ODA: official development assistanceExample to show how aid doesn’t seem to be of much help to those in need:“[A tragedy of the world’s poor has been that] the West spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last five decades and still had not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get four-dollar bed nets to poor families. The West spent $2.3 trillion and still had not managed to get three dollars to each new mother to prevent five million child deaths.

… It is heart-breaking that global society has evolved a highly efficient way to get entertainment to rich adults and children, while it can’t get twelve-cent medicing to dying poor children.”

—    William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden; Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest have Done So Much Ill and so Little Good, (Penguin Press, 2006), p. 4 

  Development assistance is often of dubious quality. In many cases,

1. Aid is primarily designed to serve the strategic and economic interests of the donor countries;

·        Many only provide aid to countries that may be of some benefit to them eg:

1.  
   1. The US has directed aid to regions where it has concerns related to its national security, e.g. Middle East, and in Cold War times in particular, Central America and the Caribbean;
   2. Sweden has targeted aid to “progressive societies”;
   3. France has sought to promote maintenance or preserve and spread of French culture, language, and influence, especially in West Africa, while disproportionately giving aid to those that have extensive commercial ties with France;
   4. Japan has also heavily skewed aid towards those in East Asia with extensive commercial ties together with conditions of Japanese purchases;

• Aid systems based on the interests of donors instead of the needs of recipients’ make development assistance inefficient;

 

1. Aid Money Often Tied to Various Restrictive Conditions: aid tied with conditions cut the value of aid to recipient countries by some 25-40 percent, because it obliges them to purchase uncompetitively priced imports from the richer nations.

 

1. Too little aid reaches countries that most desperately need it

• Poorest countries were not necessarily recipients of most aid. For example, “excluding debt relief for Nigeria, aid to sub-Saharan Africa increased by only 2%”

 

1. Or [aid is primarily designed] to benefit powerful domestic interest groups

 

1. Phantom aid:

 

·        Estimate that $37 billion—roughly half of global aid—is “phantom aid”, that is, it is not genuinely available to poor countries to fight poverty.

·        Real aid only made up 53% of the official assistance

 

1. It is undeniable that there has been poor governance, corruption and mismanagement in Africa.

 

http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAid.asp

 

Example qns:

1)      “Take from the rich and give to the poor.” Is this the solution to poverty?

2)      Is food aid the best solution to hunger?

3)      “Foreign aid is the best way to solve a country’s poverty” Discuss.