Latest update April 18th, 2024 12:59 AM
Nov 02, 2014 Editorial
The Guardian of London has been examining the diversion of funding from the United Kingdom to poor countries around the world.
Until recently Guyana was one of those countries that benefited from such funding. The Guardian noted that local communities in Nepal have for more than a decade benefited from a British-funded support programme which allowed them to implement their own projects for schools, bridges and other needs in a way combining democratic participation with spending procedures that limited opportunities for corruption.
It was a success story for British foreign aid, which surely pointed toward an expansion of the scheme. Instead the programmes have been cut by more than half, because the Nepalese central government wanted to take over the work, which will now be both more distant from those it is supposed to serve and more open to the corrupt diversion of funds.
This is one of a number of telling examples in a new report on the performance of the Department for International Development (DFID), Britain’s aid agency, according to the Guardian.
The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) has concentrated in particular on what it sees as DfID’s failure to systematically confront everyday corruption.
The bribes for access to education, healthcare, schooling, employment and justice, which strip poor people of their meagre resources, make a hard life even harder.
It must be a cause for concern when British taxpayers’ money either makes little difference to this situation or, in some cases, according to ICAI, may even make it worse.
Ever since aid to developing countries emerged in its modern form in the 1960s, there has been argument about its effectiveness and controversy over how much of it was being stolen. Those ideologically inclined to doubt its usefulness have seized on evidence that, in the pungent American phrase, much of it “goes down the rathole”, while those committed to the idea of development have tended to overlook the evident problems.
It would be absolutely wrong to see this report as some kind of condemnation of DFID, still less to seize on it as a reason to abandon the Cameron government’s ringfencing of the aid budget.
The department has had its staffing cut and its energies diverted into obsessive value-for-money exercises.
Yet it still scores well on many measures, and its reputation in the aid world is high. This is instead a call for a more coherent strategy to combat corruption, making its prevention an integral part of every programme, country by country, rather than an add-on. It suggests a variety of measures to that end.
Helping corrupt countries must inevitably involve some loss through corruption, unless we spend so much time protecting the money that we have no time to do the work.
People who fly into a rage at the thought of a single penny of British taxpayers’ money ending up in the wrong hands may find that hard to swallow. Demands for total virtue are unrealistic.
But aid programmes should be designed not only to prevent corruption and sanction it when it occurs, but to alter people’s perceptions and thereby their behaviour.
The aim should be to make both those who are guilty of corruption and those who suffer from it – not of course wholly exclusive groups – think of it differently. That way lies true development.
Guyana has been rated as one of the most corrupt countries in the world and try as it might the government is finding it impossible to shed that perception.
Indeed there are corrupt individuals in the government who think nothing of reaching out a hand for graft. Observers now believe that most of the western aid to Guyana simply disappeared because the donors responded to the voices of their people whose taxes were funding the projects in the poor overseas countries.
To its credit, Guyana has been able to attract aid from countries other than the traditional donors. China, with perhaps the deepest pockets, is one of the aid donors to Guyana. India is another.
Sadly, both countries are not known to be immune from corrupt deals and practices.
JAGDEO ADDING MORE DANGER TO GUYANA AND THE REGION
Apr 18, 2024
SportsMax – West Indies captain Hayley Matthews has been named Wisden’s leading Twenty20 Cricketer for 2023, as she topped all and sundry, including her male counterparts. Alan Gardner looks...Kaieteur News – Compliments of the Ministry of Education, our secondary school children are being treated to a stage... more
By Sir Ronald Sanders Waterfalls Magazine – On April 10, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States... more
Freedom of speech is our core value at Kaieteur News. If the letter/e-mail you sent was not published, and you believe that its contents were not libellous, let us know, please contact us by phone or email.
Feel free to send us your comments and/or criticisms.
Contact: 624-6456; 225-8452; 225-8458; 225-8463; 225-8465; 225-8473 or 225-8491.
Or by Email: [email protected] / [email protected]