prosperity
Africa is the chief victim of growing US stinginess, writes Karen De Young
Americans have set a record for stinginess in one of the most prosperous decades in their history. For as long as people have kept track, never has the United States given a smaller share of its money to the world’s poorest. The country is the most parsimonious in the world when its charity is measured as a fraction of available riches.
In 1997 the US government spent about $7-billion on non-military foreign aid, or less than one-tenth of 1% of the $8,1- trillion gross national product – the lowest percentage of any donor country, and less than half the proportion it spent 10 years earlier.
But the US is far from being the only country giving less; overall international foreign assistance fell by 21% in inflation-adjusted terms between 1992 and 1997. The reasons for the decline are easy to find. Critics say foreign assistance is wasted by bloated aid agencies pouring money into the pockets of corrupt Third World governments.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Western powers no longer felt the need to purchase Cold War loyalty, and donor nations came under pressure to attend to problems at home.
“All they want is to give taxpayers’ money away to foreign countries and be damned what happens at home,” Republican congressman Harold Rogers said last month as Congress slashed President Bill Clinton’s foreign aid budget request.
The shrinking aid package has imposed a rigid new calculus on where the assistance goes. Major natural disasters and problems in strategically important trouble-spots – Turkish earthquakes, Balkan wars and Middle East peace agreements – have continued to attract largesse, particularly when television cameras are on hand.
The principal loser is Africa, where the impact of declining funds is felt in decreasing resources to combat hunger, homelessness and disease.
The United Nations aid agencies, which depend on voluntary contributions from member nations, are the primary dispensers of assistance to Africa. This year donors have provided less than three-fifths of the $800-million UN request for emergencies in sub-Saharan Africa. The target had already been reduced by nearly a third from last year.
In September, the United Nations’ World Food Programme announced it would curtail its feeding programme for nearly 2-million refugees in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea after receiving less than 20% of requested funding. An emergency appeal to feed and shelter 600 000 Angolan refugees brought minimal initial response and predictions of mass starvation.
In Africa’s Great Lakes region nearly 4- million people are crowded into refugee camps or hiding in the hills. Mostly farmers or herders, they are without land and livestock, and often without access to humanitarian assistance. This year the United Nations estimated it would need $278-million to care for them. By late October only 45% had been donated.
Africa also has missed out on the flow of private investment funds that have offset the aid decline in East Asia and Latin America.
It is “a very Darwinian situation”, said Mark Malloch Brown, director of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
Not only was overall funding down, but the largest aid undertakings were notorious failures. In Somalia, a combined military- humanitarian intervention collapsed in lethal recrimination. In Bosnia, programmes to feed victims of atrocities became a grotesque smokescreen to conceal a lack of political will to stop the killings. In Rwanda, the international community ended up backing the perpetrators of genocide.
The aid agencies were blamed. If they couldn’t succeed in Somalia and Rwanda, where money was flowing freely, why give them more? After Rwanda, said Francisco Hochschild, special assistant to UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator Sergio Vieira de Mello, “budgets started shrinking”. But then, Hochschild said, “Kosovo turned up to save everybody.”
If the selection of those deserving of foreign assistance is Darwinian, the people of Kosovo are among the world’s fittest. The safe return of 730 000 Kosovo Albanians was “one of the most spectacular reverse population movements in contemporary history”, said the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Sadako Ogata.
But Kosovo also confirmed the worst fears of aid officials, that they have become active participants in a process that concentrates assistance on the most strategically located and widely televised crises, often at the expense of the most needy.
The amount spent on Kosovo refugees and the crush of aid agencies eager to spend it “was almost an obscenity”, said Randolph Kent, who worked with the United Nations in the Balkans.
The need in Kosovo was large and urgent, but many aid officials acknowledged that much of their eagerness came from “the CNN effect”. Television coverage both reflects and promotes high-level donor interest, so aid agencies’ activities tend to follow the cameras.
CARE USA, one of the world’s largest NGOs, considered passing on Kosovo, but concluded that the organisation would be downgraded in the eyes of donors. “They expected us to be there,” said CARE USA President Peter Bell. CARE workers from Peru, Bangladesh and Kenya were taken off assignments and sent to Kosovo.
What Kosovo highlighted for both the government and private donors, said Hochschild, “was that some were happy to set up camps at huge expense in front of the TV cameras. That’s what they’re not willing to do in Angola and Central Africa.”
Many Africans believe the aid disparity has deeper roots. During a UN Security Council meeting with African representatives in September, speakers charged that racism played a big role. A citizen of Congo was no less deserving than one from Kosovo or East Timor, said Andre Mwamba Kapanga, of the Democratic Republic of Congo. “The colour of his skin does not make him a sub-standard being.”
Nigerian representative Ibrahim Gambari called on the Security Council to compare the world’s response to the Kosovo crisis – where he said the international community spent $1,50 per day per refugee – to the response to conflicts in Sierra Leone and Rwanda, where he said the daily expenditure was 11c.
In a speech in August to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, USPresident Bill Clinton included a plug for US foreign aid to Africa. “The point is to avoid headlines about famine and refugee crisis and genocide and to replace them with stories of partnership and shared prosperity,” he said. “These are the stories we can write now if Congress will invest only a tiny portion of what we spend on defence on avoiding war in the first place.”
But it is an argument making little headway in Congress.”The United Nations has declared that 70 countries – aid recipients all – are poorer than they were in 1980,” responded aid critic Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute. “Chaos, slaughter, poverty and ruin stalked Third World states, irrespective of how much foreign assistance they received.”
UN officials reply that the assistance received by these countries pales beside that bestowed on Egypt, Israel, India, Pakistan, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others considered aid success stories. According to statistics by AID, the US government development agency, it is thanks largely to foreign aid that world literacy rose by nearly 50% in the last third of this century, infant mortality halved, life expectancy tripled and 71 more nations have become “free or partly free”.
But the scepticism is strengthened by troubled situations such as that in Central Africa. At least two wars are simultaneously being fought in the region, ethnic strife has led to the slaughter of thousands of people, including aid workers, and the parties seem impervious to pleas to stop. Even where there is peace in Africa, corruption often siphons off resources at staggering levels.
In a recent appeal for funds, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan acknowledged that there sometimes seemed little promise that aid to Africa would accomplish much. “There are places where the view of Africa as a region in perpetual crisis is not just an image but a painful reality,” he said. “But there are also places, more than is commonly recognised, where we are witnessing dramatic changes for the better.” Although problems persisted in some countries, the international community must “seize this moment” to engage with those parts of a society prepared to turn a corner.
As funding falls, aid organisations have reduced their staffs and ambitions. They have also begun to search for innovative ways to solicit money and more intelligent ways to spend it.
“For me, the issue is do you go back and shake the tin cup, or try to develop a new strategy, new sources of funding, a new rationale for funding and new services?” said the UNDP’s Brown. “The development community has had to scramble to develop a corporate discipline and a culture that were absent during the Cold War years when money was shovelled in.”
Some experts have advocated small steps, away from the huge development projects of the past and direct support for inept governments and toward micro-loans, health projects administered by local villagers and education programmes for small business entrepreneurs.
AID is looking for ways to take advantage of new data indicating that Americans are more supportive of foreign aid than Congress assumes, but are misinformed about how much their government spends. Although the figure is less than 1% of GNP, most opinion poll respondents guess it is about 15%, and suggest 5% would be better.
Aid leaders such as Brown, World Bank President James D Wolfensohn and James H Michel, the outgoing chair of the development committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), have called on donor nations to look for new strategies and reject what Wolfensohn calls the “Darwinian theory of development whereby we discard the unfit by the wayside”.
The donor governments have said they share the concern, and have pledged to do something about it. Pressure has mounted within the G-7 group of the world’s leading industrialised nations for Third World debt forgiveness. Britain, Canada and Germany have made substantive moves in that direction, although Clinton’s proposal to do the same in next year’s budget was rejected by Congress.
In 1996 the OECD, which groups 21 of the world’s richest countries, agreed to raise individual annual aid expenditures to at least seven-tenths of 1% of GNP – a commitment later made by the G-7.
By last year, however, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden remained the only ones to meet the OECD funding target. Fifteen of the 21 OECD donors, including all G-7 members except France, weren’t even halfway there. Five gave less than the year before.