GIVING AID WON’T SOLVE;
ITS UNCOORDINATED & UNACOUNTABLE
Butler, Zabjek & Hutchinson, 8.13.2006
(Don, Alexandra & Alex, The Ottawa Citizen, “The failure of aid,” l/n)
Over the past half-century, rich donor nations have funnelled $2.3 trillion U.S. into foreign aid. That's about $80,000 for every person in Canada, and 23,500 times more than the world's highest-paid athlete, Tiger Woods, earned last year. Yet all that money hasn't made poverty history. Not even close. In Africa, the world's poorest region, half the population lives on less than a dollar a day. Life expectancy is actually falling, averaging just 46 years. Thirty years ago, the average income in sub-Saharan Africa was double that of South and East Asia. Today, after decades of aid, it's less than half. This dismal state of development both stokes the HIV/AIDS pandemic ravaging the continent and severely complicates efforts to combat it. As author William Easterly observes in The White Man's Burden, his indictment of western efforts to eradicate poverty, all that aid hasn't even provided the cheap fixes that could save millions of lives. Medicine that would prevent half of all malaria deaths, for example, costs just 12 cents a dose. A bed net that would protect a child from getting malaria costs $4. Why hasn't aid had more impact? Easterly, a former World Bank economist, blames "Planners," well-intentioned westerners who devise utopian schemes designed to lift impoverished nations, holus-bolus, out of their misery -- a modern incarnation, he says, of the white man's burden mentality of colonial times. This top-down approach has mostly been a disaster, he says. It's unco-ordinated and unaccountable. By trying to do too much, it ends up doing little. It promotes western values and institutions that often can't be externally imposed. It ignores past failures and embraces more of the same. It channels billions to corrupt leaders -- gangsters, Easterly calls them -- who steal or squander the money. And it measures success by the volume of aid dollars pledged rather than the results they generate. Easterly's analysis is controversial. But many now agree that, despite some notable successes, official aid is at a crossroads and fundamental changes are urgently required.
"I don't think more aid, in the way that it's being used now, is the answer," says Molly Kane, executive director of Inter Pares, an Ottawa-based NGO. "In fact, if there's more aid that's not spent better, it can often cause more damage."