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WHAT IS WRONG WITH INTERNATIONAL AID?
Correction needed please
by Phil Bartle, PhD
Dedicated to the memory of the late Bill McWhinney, volunteer in Sri Lanka 1961, First Executive Director of Cuso, Senior Vice Preident of CIDA
Introduction to the Module (Hub)
Documents Included in this Aid Module
- The Real Problem with Aid, Why poverty has increased, not decreased
- Implications for Donor Management, What to change and how to change it
- Implications for Host Country Management, Perhaps the tougheset element to correct
- Implications for Mobilisers and Activists, A worldwide groundswell is needed
- Corruption and Poverty, A major factor
- Dependency and Poverty, More insiduous than cargo cults
- Corruption and the Multiplier, Diverting public funds for personal benefit causes far more damage than is apparent
- Discusssions, Foreign Aid
- Locomotives and Wheat, two stories
The problem is how it is delivered
Kindness can kill
During the last half century, the overdeveloped nations have spent more than a trillion dollars on international aid to the poor world. What has it achieved? More poverty.
This is not merely a failure of aid to reduce poverty. The way aid has been delivered is the major contributor to that increase in poverty.
In contrast to the assumptions of many, like Bono, this is not a problem of lack of money for aid. The money is there.
Among the five major factors of poverty, two are important here, dependency and corruption. Our methods of delivering aid have contributed to both
Some major and important changes need to be made, and this module looks at the role of community mobilisers, and the role of senior government, politicians and civil servants, in both the giving and receiving countries.
I heard a returned Canadian volunteer plaintifly say a few days ago, "Maybe we did not do a good enough job." She was wrong; volunteers are not the fault, and most, as I have seen, do excellent jobs. It is simply that their impact is so small it does not have much effect. What needs to change are the big donors, the UN, World Bank, and the big donor governments
This site is dedicated to training community workers. Community workers working in only a few communities will not have a big impact on those who have the power to make the change. But what is needed is advocacy and, as activists, mobilisers can help to raise the needed universal groundswell of concern so as to change things at the top, and that will make a difference.
If we do not make those changes, we are doomed to continue in the same direction, and things will get far worse than they are now.
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Seminar on Delivering Aid:
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