The Guardian view on the effectiveness of British foreign aid: a sharper focus on everyday corruption
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Version 0 of 1. 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. 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. |