More Somali Woes

 Somali remittances are a lifeline. The United Nations estimates Somalis in the diaspora send home $1.6bn annually, significantly more than foreign aid. According to a UN study, more than 40% of Somalis receive remittances, the bulk of which are used for basic needs, including food, clothes, medicine and education. Total annual remittances to Somalia are estimated at $1.6bn (£1bn). There is no functioning banking system in Somalia, so remittances are the only way people outside the country can support those at home. They play a crucial role during the frequent droughts as international aid agencies use them in cash for food programmes.

Somalia has criticised a move by a US bank to close accounts of money transfer companies. Merchants Bank of California handles about 80% of money transfers - remittances - from the US to Somalia, worth about $200m (£131m) annually. But it announced on Thursday that it had to withdraw its services due to new money-laundering regulations. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a federal regulator, told the US bank last year that it found its anti-money laundering procedures inadequate. In the US, bank directors are responsible for ensuring all the funds they handle are used for legitimate purposes. In a similar move in 2013, UK banking giant Barclays also sought to cut ties with Somalia by closing the account of leading Somali money-transfer operator Dahabshiil. Barclays, which said the move was part of a crackdown on money laundering, eventually agreed to keep the account open so that Dahabshiil could find a replacement bank.

"They are the lifeblood... for many, many Somalis, so from a humanitarian perspective it is clearly worrying if there is a complete stop in remittances," said Nicholas Kay, the United Nations special representative for Somalia, said the remittances were a survival mechanism for Somali families.

When aid pays for land-grabbing

A major UK- and World Bank-funded development programme in Ethiopia may have contributed to the violent resettlement of a minority ethnic group, a report reveals. The World Bank’s internal watchdog said that due to inadequate oversight, bad audit practices, and a failure to follow its own rules, the Bank has allowed operational links to form between its programme and the Ethiopian government’s controversial resettlement programme.

Multiple human rights groups operating in the region have criticised the Ethiopian government’s programme for violently driving tens of thousands of indigenous people, predominantly from the minority Anuak Christian ethnic group, from their homes in order to make way for commercial agriculture projects. Bank funds – which included over £300m from the UK’s Department for International Development, the project’s largest donor  – could have been diverted to implement villagisation. Crucially for the Anuak people, the bank did not apply required safeguards to protect indigenous groups.

David Pred of Inclusive Development International – the NGO which filed the original complaint on the Anuak group’s behalf – said: “The Bank has enabled the forcible transfer of tens of thousands of indigenous people from their ancestral lands. The Bank today just doesn’t want to see human rights violations, much less accept that it bears some responsibility when it finances those violations.”

Anuradha Mittal, the founder of the Oakland Institute, a California-based development NGO which is active in the region, said DfID was an active participant in the programme, and should share responsibility for its failings. “Along with the World Bank and other donors, DfID support constitutes not only financial support but a nod of approval for the Ethiopian regime to bring about ‘economic development’ for the few at the expense of basic human rights and livelihoods of its economically and politically most marginalised ethnic groups,” she said. Mittal was also critical of the World Bank panel’s draft findings, falling short of directly implicating the World Bank and its fellow donors in the resettlement programme. “It is quite stunning that the panel does not think that the World Bank is responsible for villagisation-related widespread abuses in Ethiopia resulting in destruction of livelihoods, forced displacement of Anuaks from their fertile lands and forests.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/20/ethiopia-human-rights-groups-development-programme-world-bank-villagisation

Why Volunteer for Voluntary Work?

The New York Times reports that an estimated 100 million Americans go overseas to volunteer each year, and African countries are the most popular destinations for these trips.

Mwangi, a Kenyan activist wants to know: “Why?”

“There’s nothing wrong with service, and helping others by going abroad. I think it’s a very noble idea. The question is why are you doing it? Why go abroad when you can stop at the local homeless shelter?” Mwangi says, pointing especially to the experiences of black Americans in their own country. “My concern is that while you guys are out trying to save the word, you’re neglecting what’s going on at home.

One student tells Mwangi she wanted to volunteer abroad as an advocate for women’s rights in India, Africa, and the Middle East.

“So as a woman of color, why would you travel all the way to India to talk about women when you have race issues in your country that affect your people, people who look like you, and young black men? If you speak about it here, they’ll hear you more, because you’re local,” Mwangi says bluntly, before apologizing for putting her on the spot. Mwangi believes that students should spend time volunteering and advocating for change in their own communities before going international. 

One uncomfortable revelation was that it’s likely foreign volunteers in African countries benefit personally more than the communities they are trying to help thanks to the resume - and university application-enhancing powers of such an apparent altruistic endeavour.

Aid Versus Raid

Western countries are using aid to Africa as a smokescreen to hide the "sustained looting" of the continent as it loses nearly $60bn a year through tax evasion, climate change mitigation, and the flight of profits earned by foreign multinational companies, the Guardian quoted as a group of NGOs has saying. The perception that such aid is helping African countries "has facilitated a perverse reality in which the UK and other wealthy governments celebrate their generosity whilst simultaneously assisting their companies to drain Africa's resources", the report claims.

Although sub-Saharan Africa receives $134bn each year in loans, foreign investment and development aid, research by a group of UK and Africa-based NGOs suggests that $192bn leaves the region, leaving a $58bn shortfall. According to the report, while western countries send about $30bn in development aid to Africa every year, more than six times that amount leaves the continent, "mainly to the same countries providing that aid".

It points out that foreign multinational companies siphon $46bn out of sub-Saharan Africa each year, while $35bn is moved from Africa into tax havens around the world annually. African governments also spend $21bn a year on debt repayments. Aid sent in the form of loans serves only to contribute to the continent's debt crisis.

Saving Africa

Western “solutions” to African’s problems don’t solve anything except Western NGO workers’ need for a regular salary.

Since 2005 LifeStraws proclaimed as a “cheap, portable personal water purifier,” has been picking up awards; Esquire said it was an innovation of the year in 2005, Time called it the “best invention of the year,” Gizmag, without any contrition, called it the “invention of the century” and Forbes called it “one of the 10 things that will change the world” in 2006. The “straw” is a long blue tube that “provides access to safe drinking water by converting microbiologically contaminated water into safe drinking water.” Publicity images of it show black Africans, sometimes half naked, bending over to drink purified water through it. Paul Hetherington, a spokesman for WaterAid in the UK, claimed “it is something that may well have very useful applications in an emergency scenario. But it’s not a development tool, it doesn’t really solve the problem of getting water to people.” Innovative devices like LifeStraw aren’t created with malicious intent, nor are they necessarily ineffective; many work perfectly fine.

But let’s look at the images again; young, half-naked Africans hip deep in a pool of water, stooping to drink the water through one of these devices. When Europeans travel to countries with sub-standard water, they sometimes bring water filtration systems, tablets or other means to purify water. We don’t see pictures of them bending over streams, cow-like, drinking water through LifeStraws. High-tech straws are not suggested as a means to solving filtration problems for white people, say, in parts of rural Russia or Romania, where there might be contaminated water, so why are they “good enough” for Africans? And it isn’t just about straws: the device is emblematic of an entire industry of suddenly popular, quickly forgotten programs and devices that will “save” Africans or “solve” Africa’s problems.

Lack of access to safe drinking water is the problem. Almost a billion people worldwide are estimated to not have access to safe water; and supposedly around 35 percent of them live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Basically that means most of Africa doesn’t have access to decent water. That’s a problem. It was also a problem for Europe and the West well into the 20th century. So why is it that all the processes that led to safe drinking water in Europe are not seen as workable for Africa? Why is it the “answer” to African problems is always some charity with portable toilets or stoves or some other device – even cardboard bicycles – that no one would ever expect poverty-stricken Europeans to use? Google “solve Africa’s drinking water problems” and you come across “a giant basket that uses condensation to gather drinking water.” Looks pretty, next to some grass huts. But they won’t be using that in Nevada. Nope. Just for Africans.

Another website claims to have “15 concepts for providing clean drinking water,” which include a photo of African children who “pump while playing” and another that proposes transforming “sewage to drinking water.” Sounds wonderful. No one expects people in America to drink sewage, but in Malawi it’s a great idea. Another system made by SunDwater uses a “green...low-cost, low maintenance system that converts dirty or salty water into potable water.” It involves a four-square-meter photovoltaic dish (like a satellite dish) and the water is condensed on it. It sounds nice, but it isn’t a real solution; after all, no one is going to be using it in Portugal, so why expect it to be used widely in Uganda?

A story in 2013 tells of a school in Tel Aviv where ninth and tenth graders are testing the simplest, cheapest and fastest way to solve the problem of malnutrition.” In plastic bottles they had bred a blue-green algae called spirulina, that looked like green slime, and the theory was this would be good for Africa. I have a better idea: serve this in the cafeteria of schools in the wealthy communities of Israel, and if the kids there agree to eat it for a year, then export this idea to Africa. Because if a bunch of nice kids in your community don’t want to eat green algae, don’t expect “Africans” to want to.

“Watering the grassroots” was a project to train African women to solve water problems.” Using a “rainwater harvesting system” Oddly, that wasn’t the solution to China’s drinking- water issues. Just Africa. In China the Ministry of Water Resources estimated that as of 2005 three-hundred million people were unable to access safe drinking water. Almost 200 million people in rural areas were still exposed to harmful substances. To combat these problems the government was investing in a massive “11th five year plan” which envisioned plowing $5 billion into safe drinking water. By contrast 334 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa were estimated in 2010 to not have access to clean drinking water. That’s roughly the same as in China, yet in China they are digging up rivers, laying pipe and building massive infrastructure projects worth twice the GDP of Malawi to combat this scourge; they are not handing out straws, solar panels and baskets.

Solutions to problems in Africa tend to involve handing out 21st century high-tech gadgets to infrastructure-poor countries that require massive 20th century reforms and solutions. All of the problems Africa faces, whether it is the supposed need for “smokeless stoves” or clean water, are ones every other country in the world faces or has faced. Yet the solution for Africa almost always does not take into account incremental changes that people want; rather they envision some miracle device that “solves all these problems, and would help reach the Millennium Development Goals,” or some foreign imposed solution. The Western concept of “saving” and “solving” Africa’s problems too often derives from a sub-conscious racist “white man’s burden” mentality, wherein the “starving African” is “saved” by the white man from abroad. The solutions offered are manifestly inadequate and ridiculous, but serve industries of charity and self-promotion. The legions of nonsensical awards for these inventions are part of this “salvation” culture. If you want to save Africa, demand that the technology be exported there to bring it up to Western standards. Don’t expect people there to live a life drinking out of straws like cattle and eating algae slime.

“Saving” Africa, or “building schools in Africa” has nothing really to do with Africa.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-Incognita-Stop-saving-Africa-385994

Aid?

Data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development indicate that net overseas development aid to Sub-Saharan Africa was USD$39 billion in 2008, USD$42 billion in 2009, USD$43 billion in 2010, USD$45 billion in 2011, and USD$44 billion in 2012. That is a total of USD$213 billion of aid donations in five years. Which then begs the question -- where did all this money go, given the fact that the population remains desperately poor? Six-hundred-million people, 70 per cent of population, are currently without access to electricity. 

The short answer is that aid is largely "lost in transition." Donated by political elites of donor nations to fund projects, programs or recipient's budgets, aid funds and programs are executed by two sets of officialdom -- donor and recipient bureaucrats. The same bureaucrats, together with thousands of consultants from mainly donor nations that consume billions of aid dollars, monitor and evaluate themselves. The aid machine keeps running not matter what. Dambisa Moyo argued that aid has trapped Africa in a vicious circle of dependency, corruption, market distortion, and grinding poverty. This leaves the continent "with nothing but the 'need' for more aid." 

Moyo’s solution in her book ‘Dead Aid’ of free market capitalism is also a dead-end. 

The Chinese influence

A recent study shows China’s development aid for Africa flows primarily to the home-lands of leading African politicians, when there was greater need for aid in another part of the same country. On average, 270% more financial contributions go to these locations rather than to other areas, the study reveals.

“Leading politicians in recipient countries spend a portion of Chinese aid on personal interests, which can restrict the effectiveness of the aid,” said Axel Dreher, from the Alfred-Weber-Institute for Economics at the University of Heidelberg and was among the authors of the study Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China’s Foreign Assistance. The team, consisting of researchers from the United States, Switzerland, Australia and Germany, investigated around 2,000 Chinese development aid projects from 2010 to 2012. The study covered more than 3,500 locations and a total aid value of $90 billion.

China has repeatedly indicated that its foreign investments are not attached to any political agenda. But it is precisely this supposed neutrality that gives African elites the ability to use the funds to their own advantage, the researchers point out. “China’s position makes it possible for African politicians to transfer a substantial portion of Chinese funding to their constituencies,” Dreher indicated. The fact that leading African politicians use development funds to finance their own political agendas immensely undermines the effectiveness of Chinese development aid.

Economically the bilateral trade volume last year exceeded $ 200 billion. In the past, China invested mainly in Africa’s extractive industry. Now things are changing. Currently, Beijing’s investment in African energy accounts for just 20% of the total. China is investing more in infrastructure, manufacturing, and agricultural industries. Beijing’s primary interest is no longer African energy, rather in manufacturing industries. China’s position in the global production networks, by transferring its cost-effective industry to Africa. The previously destination for outsourcing are now the out-sourcers themselves.

Aid, Ebola and the White Saviour Industrial Complex

Have we learned nothing? Thirty years ago, the Band-Aid video showed pop stars with 1980s hair raising funds for “Africa”. But it wasn’t for Africa, even though the resulting record featured a guitar in the shape of a continent. It was Ethiopia, and the resulting “documentary” began with BBC clips of starving people lined up for food in a camp, with the usual flies swarming, hollowed eyes, and white doctors being interviewed regarding their plight. The songs, the recordings, the video – all identified all of Africa with these images of helplessness, sounding the call of the “white savior industrial complex” for a new generation. Despite the feel-good super sales of the song, controversy continues around the question of whether the effort did more material harm than good.

Fast forward to today: The just-released remix of the principal song of the 1984 Band-Aid concerts — “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” — plays to the same sentiments with many of the same stars (and some new ones, like One Direction) — and has all of the same problems. Again, have we really learned nothing? The video opens with what was known in the 1990s as “aid pornography” (a term and debate which unfortunately has dropped from the radar screen) – shots of dying people – shots that these stars would never allow of themselves. Then we see them filing into the studio one-by-one in the requisite shades, every move (but looking good, not in the throes of death) captured by paparazzi, then emotionally singing, then holding each other, giggling and smiling after they have done their good deed.

Yes, funds are needed to fight Ebola; yes, people are suffering; yes, it can be good to “do good”. But it is never good to show others’ suffering without their consent, especially when showing them stripped of dignity. And as many of the CIHA Blog’s posts and those of others insist, over and over again, what we need is to target the neoliberal austerity policies that have led to the breakdown of health systems in West Africa as well as other areas of the world (including many parts of the U.S.) Representing Africans – yet again – as helpless and without dignity while representing ourselves as knowledgeable problem-solvers (who give up nothing in our attempts to do good) IS part of the problem and NOT part of the solution. We Westerners really should have learned something by now.

by Cecelia Lynch, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Institute for International, Global and Regional Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

from here with links

The Rape of Africa

Despite decades of public fundraising and aid, the end to Africa’s poverty is nowhere in sight. This “aid” is actually a smokescreen used to hide from public view the fact the it is the donors themselves who are perpetuating this cycle of dependence. Africa is essentially not poor. A combination of inequitable policies, massive disparities in power and criminal activities perpetrated and sustained by wealthy elites both inside and outside the continent are keeping its people in poverty. The UK and other wealthy governments are at the heart of this theft.

A coalition of UK and African researchers has released findings that illustrate how the continent actually loses over six times the amount it receives in aid. 

As we often watch wealthy countries heap on themselves and each other generous portions of praise for helping ‘needy’ countries and using their donations to accelerate development in impoverished regions so as to end poverty, another scenario is playing itself out. This scenario is rarely reported. Africa, the receiver of $30 billion in annual monetary handouts, is not only making nothing from the aid it receives but it actually loses $192 billion to the rest of the world within the same time frame.

Research published recently indicates that current practices within the continent tend to favour wealthy countries. These practices include tax dodging, the repatriation of multinational companies’ profits with their unjust trade policies, the costs incurred from climate change and the exodus of skilled workers. This means, basically, that if you take into account the money coming in through aid, investment and remittances ($134 billion), Africa is left with a $58 billion annual loss. To put this into perspective, the money that Africa loses each year is over one and half times the amount of additional money needed to deliver affordable health care to everyone in the whole world!

$35.3 billion annually through the tax evasion and other dodgy financial flows enabled by tax havens. These tax havens are jurisdictionally linked to the G8 and the European Union and account for 70% of global tax haven investment. The UK has 11 tax havens under its jurisdiction!

It is time to stop misrepresenting the real nature of the relationship between aid and poverty in Africa.

When subsidising the wealthy is charity

Millions of pounds of British aid money to tackle poverty overseas has been invested in builders of gated communities, shopping centres and luxury property in poor countries, the Guardian can reveal. Wholly owned by the Department for International Development (DfID), CDC invests in private companies with the stated aim of reducing poverty in developing countries. Its investments count as aid and DfID is its sole shareholder. CDC has investments in construction and property across sub-Saharan Africa from Ghana to Zambia as well as in India. Many projects appear to cater to the elite.

In Kenya, $25m has been put into a 13-hectare (32-acre) mega-development in Nairobi called Garden City with hundreds of upmarket flats, a business hotel and what will be east Africa's largest shopping centre.  A glossy brochure for Garden City in Nairobi, which includes 400-plus flats and townhouses, boasts: "From the aquamarine water of the heated swimming pool to the ultra-modern fitted kitchen, solid bamboo flooring and glass balcony balustrades, quality is the defining characteristic of the Garden City Village."

In Mauritius, more than $24m has gone to a developer whose portfolio includes a 170-hectare "aspirational ocean lifestyle village", with luxury beachfront homes from $500,000 and an elite boarding school managed by the Berkshire-based Wellington College. A brochure for Azuri, a development for the CDC-backed Indian Ocean Real Estate Company, invites would-be residents to "Close your eyes and imagine yourself breathing in the warm Indian ocean breeze, absorbing all that the Mauritian lifestyle has to offer." Azuri offers "exquisite, high-quality living" with an expansive oceanfront resort, five-star hotel, yacht club and spa – "the ideal living environment to promote both bodily and spiritual happiness".

In addition to upscale residential developments, CDC has millions invested in shopping centres across sub-Saharan Africa, including the huge Jabi Lake mall in Abuja, Nigeria,which aims to "meet the desires of sophisticated Nigerians wanting a compelling retail experience with leisure facilities and high-quality brands". In Nigeria investments also include two Protea hotels – part of a chain recently bought by Marriott International – including one in Lagos at which rooms booked online start at $400 a night.

Nick Dearden, director of the World Development Movement, accused the government of exporting a "highly financialised, highly unequal, highly ideological form of 'development' which helps big business, not ordinary people. If you live in a slum in Nairobi, seeing development money pouring into a luxury block of flats is an insult."

In Kenya, Dereje Alemayehu, Christian Aid's east Africa country manager, said hotels and shopping centres could not be considered neglected economic sectors. "There are already more than enough such facilities for tourists, expats and the relatively large national middle class."

Does anyone seriously believe this Government is interested helping the poor in Africa for example when it is so dismissive of the fact that so many UK families rely on food banks?

Charity and aid doesn't stop poverty

For Nina Munk’s new book, “The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty,” she spent six years following the Millennium Villages Project. The brainchild of Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs, MVP has over the past 10 years funneled more than $100 million into an ambitious antipoverty program in Africa. Munk’s book focuses closely on two villages — one in Kenya and the other in Uganda.

Extracts from an interview by her

“Jeffrey Sachs and his team, hoping to create a modern economy from scratch, introduce fertilizer and high-yield seeds, with the idea that people would grow and sell cash crops — tomatoes, soybeans, corn.  And sure enough, when you introduce fertilizer, you get extraordinary results. In Ruhiira, in a single season average maize yields increased from 1.8 tons per hectare to 3.7 tons. There was an enormous bumper crop.

The problem was what to do with the crop. No one had really thought of the next stage. There were no storage facilities for the surplus, and there was no market for it. Southern Ugandans don’t like maize, but the village was so far away that any profits would be wiped out by transport cost. Then there were rats and vermin who took over the town. Eventually the farmers threw up their hands and dumped the maize on the market and prices collapsed.

Ruhiira is a perfect example of what goes wrong with well-intentioned ideas. Providing fertilizer and high-yield seeds is a magnificent idea. It looks flawless on paper. But soon you face a whack-a-mole problem. You fix one problem but a whole host of others suddenly pop up.

 These big ideas imposed by outsiders can be breathtakingly arrogant. What, then, is the solution, if we care about the world's poor, as I hope most of us do.

If your goal is to help a limited number of people in a single village, you can do that. That's called charity. In the Millennium Villages Project many people's lives have been improved. There is less malnutrition, less malaria, more children in school in all of those villages. If you invest $5 or $10 million into an isolated African village, you are going to get results. Far too many nonprofits and NGOs boast about the sums of money that they're spending on big projects. That's no way to evaluate an antipoverty program.

Brand-new neonatal incubators sitting unused in the corner of a clinic because there was no electricity in the village. The skeletons of well-intentioned development projects litter the continent of Africa — bridges that lead nowhere, rusted tractors, broken water wells, schools that were never completed, maternity wards that are crumbling. One of the great hurdles of charity work in Africa is making sure that the work is maintained. In many places there simply aren't the tools or the knowledge to maintain projects built by outsiders. In Dertu, Kenya on the border of Somalia, there was a water well built by UNICEF in the 1990s. It's a life-saver for the area, one of few sources of water in an arid spread of land populated by nomadic camel herders. But every time the well pump breaks down, it can take months and months to fix it or for parts to arrive. And in the meantime, people just drop dead.

When the water well broke down, and the Millennium Villages Project decided to keep people alive by bringing in huge water tanks to supply water. But the supply of water simply wasn't enough to sustain the people and their camels. And before long fighting broke out, and a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death because he was accused of cutting in line for water. The driver of the water tanker was beaten up by a mob. When you see desperate people fighting over limited resources you begin to understand how fragile human life is there.

One of the consequences of the Millennium Villages Project pouring a lot of money into this pastoral community is that more and more people gave up being camel herders and decided to settle instead in town. Thanks to the Millennium Villages Project, Dertu became an island of prosperity. There was a fully functioning clinic, a vastly expanded school, all kinds of new investments that encouraged nomads to become sedentary. I returned again and again to Dertu, and I saw this place that had been a sort of wide-open pastoral area begin to resemble an urban slum, with tightly packed housing, sewage running through the streets. It was, again, a horrible unintended consequence of good intentions. There is no economy to speak of in Dertu. The nomadic herdsman coming through trade or sell livestock. Some of them sell camel milk. Basically the only economic activity there has been gun-running and cattle raiding. This is the great failing of the Millennium Villages Project, and of so many other antipoverty efforts in developing parts of the world.

Jeffrey Sachs and his team came in and spent a great deal of money to lift people on what Sachs calls the “ladder of economic development.” Health care was improved, malaria went down, more children were in school. They had one success after another in basic indicators. But that doesn’t mean people had jobs. Nor was there is anything to suggest there could ever be industry in a place like this.

The lack of transparency is unfortunately the only way that many NGOs know how to operate. They are afraid that if they tell their donors about failures the flow of money will stop. In order to keep funding, nonprofits are forced to paper over and in some ways lie about some outright failures. Anyone who has ever worked in development knows perfectly well that maybe as much as half the money ends up being wasted.”

The business of charity

A British charity which builds wells in Africa was refused overseas aid funding because its bid was not “innovative” - but the consultants who decide which charities should be helped were paid a million pounds.

 It is a small British charity with a simple goal – to supply clean water to villagers in some of Africa’s poorest countries.Just £3,000 can build a well  serving 4,000 people. A further £170 provides a latrine. Such straightforward schemes can save and transform lives. Operation WellFound has so far built more than 25 wells in four countries. WellFound has worked in Kenya, Senegal and Guinea Bissau, building sealed wells with hand pumps in areas where families previously sent their children many miles to fetch fresh water, or risked contracting dysentery, typhoid and cholera from contaminated shallow wells. WellFound requested £250,000 to build wells and latrines for 60,000 people in Burkina Faso, one of the most impoverished nations on Earth. The bid for funding was referred by the Department for International Development (DfID) to Triple Line Consulting, a London-based company which advises on overseas aid, to be examined in detail. The application was rejected. In an email sent by Triple Line to WellFound, the consultancy gave three reasons why the charity should not receive funding. The bid was considered not “sufficiently innovative”; it did not clearly explain how poverty would be alleviated; and it did not provide evidence of how the work could be replicated on a larger scale in the future.

 £29 million was paid in the past 12 months to Triple Line, whose main contract is to assess applications for grants from DfID’s Global Poverty Action Fund. The company passed on £27.1 million of the funding to aid providers it had vetted, while keeping the remaining £1.9 million as a fee for its services. Charities which are approved by Triple Line do not qualify for funding straight away. Instead, they are subjected to a second round of scrutiny by a different consultancy – this time a specialist branch of the global accounting firm KPMG. In the same 12 months, DfID paid KPMG more than £35 million. According to KPMG sources, most was passed on to aid providers and £3.5 million was kept as a fee.  

 Triple Line, based in Putney, south-west London, is owned by two directors who founded the company in 1999: Lydia Richardson, 42, a “socio-economist”, who lives with her husband in a £1 million house in Southfields, south-west London, and David Smith, 54, an economist, who lives with his family in a £750,000 house a few streets away. Triple Line – which states on its website “We operate on the principles of openness, transparency, accountability and trust” – is registered as a small company, meaning it is not required to publish its accounts. Last night its owners declined to disclose what the company’s income or profits were last year, or how much they were paid in salary or dividends.

A DfID spokesman said: “Operation WellFound was one of 238 applicants for a grant under the Global Poverty Action Fund. The top 20 will be awarded a grant. The nature of a competitive process means there will necessarily be a number of organisations that will just miss out.”

Aid - the negative industry

The financial figures are trotted out so often they are becoming almost boring: seven of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies, 13 countries with a higher per capita GDP than China, a fast-emerging middle-class with higher household spending than India.

Unfortunately, such truths have been obscured by the Live Aid legacy. For all their fine intentions, the mega-concerts proved a disaster for Africa. The tone was set by the absence of African artists from the line-ups of bands playing at concerts designed to save their continent. The message was clear: it was western voices that counted.

Two decades ago there were thought to be 70 charities operating in Ethiopia; today, the figure is close to 5,000. In Kenya, there is a slum with an estimated one charity for every 32 people living there. After any major disaster, where once 40 groups operated, there will now be in excess of 1,000, causing chaos and confusion rather than helping the afflicted, as seen following the Haitian earthquake two years ago. Western politicians of all hues, desperate to look sensitive and caring, cravenly pandered to this aid lobby led by Bob and Bono, while journalists put on kid gloves when engaging with it, ignoring practices that would provoke outrage elsewhere. As a result, global aid spending soared from £50bn a year to £83bn over the first decade of this century.

 Today 595,000 people work in a fiercely-competitive industry.

A study last year found even among these aid workers only about one-third thought their projects worked. In private, many will admit to grave doubts. You could fill this entire newspaper with examples of how the flood of money washes down the drain: a report by two health economists, for example, found nearly two-thirds of health aid in Africa is diverted. The waste, the ineptitude, the tolerance of corruption, the support for repression, the furthering of inequality, the boosting of arms spending is utterly scandalous.

First, all those new colonialists riding around in their big white jeeps telling the locals what is good for them. "They don't consult with us," complained a minister in Somalia, latest recipient of massive British aid. "It's like a doctor trying to prescribe medicine for a patient you haven't seen yet." This distorts priorities of recipient nations. It leads to the creation of pointless bureaucracy – one study found a typical African country must churn out 10,000 aid reports each year. Additionally, while Western government attacks welfare dependency at home, it encourages it abroad with unquestioning support for politicians who have no need to bother responding to the needs of their own citizens.

Imagine how you would feel if armies of Africans came and told you how to run your schools and hospitals (while living in some of the smartest homes)? Or funded politicians who steal and murder? But this is the West's approach abroad: we know best, our voices count. This is how Britain ended up funding a regime that sent a hit squad to this country to kill people. And how it spent £1bn supporting education in just three east African countries but failed to check whether the teachers turned up or the children were learning; sadly, they were not.

Second, there is strong competition from all those charities for your money. They produce adverts and leaflets to tug your conscience, making it seem like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse – war, poverty, starvation, disease – gallop constantly across Africa. "If you are not negative enough, you won't get the funding," confessed one charity boss. A study suggested the dominant image remains "malnutrition and pot-bellied young children desperate for help with flies on their faces". The result of all this poverty porn – especially combined with a similar and lazy media narrative – is that Westerners see the continent as one benighted and dangerous country, not a vibrant, inventive and increasingly-successful collection of 54 diverse nations. This constant negative imagery puts them off travelling or trading there.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/ian-birrell-geldofs-obsession-with-aid-hurt-africa-but-now-trade-is-healing-the-scars-7792579.html

Hollow Promises

"Today we commit to launch a New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition to accelerate the flow of private capital to African agriculture...This New Alliance will lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next decade," the G-8 said in a statement.

Oxfam warned the announcement focuses too heavily on the role of the private sector to tackle the complex challenges of food insecurity in the developing world. The organization called instead for G8 leaders to keep the promises they have already made to help developing countries. Remember the 2005 G-8 Summit in Gleneagles, Scotland? The USA, Canada, Italy, France, the UK, Germany, Japan and Russia promised Africans to provide an extra $25bn a year for Africa as part of a $50bn increase in financial assistance by 2010. Well, unsurprisingly, the extra $25 billion hasn't been realised and neither has the additional $50 billion. Remember three years ago, at the G8 Summit in L'Aquila, Italythe leaders of the world's richest countries pledged $22 billion to poor countries that had goods plans to tackle hunger. Seven months away from the end of the L'Aquila initiative but the G8 countries are still fulfil their pledges.

"The New Alliance is neither new nor a true alliance," said Oxfam's Lamine Ndiaye.

The G-8 is promising to simply point their private companies towards Africa's shores.  As if  private companies haven't already jumped on the Africa bandwagon  to make profits for themselves. If they can't make a healthy return, then why should they invest? Altruism? Private-sector entities "don't answer to other G8 leaders, they answer to their shareholders," noted Oxfam's Porter McConnell in a blog post.

 Nor is it the lack of Western agricultural investment is the reason that our children either die of hunger or suffer stunted growth. Quite, the contrary when many countries are confronted by the inward investment of international land-grab and the consequent displacement of local people to make way for the creation of commercial cash-crop agriculture. With global food demand expected to grow by at least 70 percent by 2050 and with sub-Saharan Africa home to up to 60 percent of the world's unused arable land. A half century ago, Africa was a food exporter. Many wish for it to be again but without feedng its own people first.

Agribusiness giants such as DuPont, Monsanto and Cargill , along with smaller companies will commit some billions of dollars for projects to help farmers in the developing world build local markets and improve productivity.The New Alliance is a top down plan that does not reflect what many people in poor countries say they want or need. The solutions for problems must come from within, not without. One doesn't need a huge surge of dollars to feed the mouths of our children.

Neil Watkins, policy director at the U.S. aid group ActionAid voiced concern it may be difficult to link up the world's giant agribusiness companies with some of its poorest farm laborers. "These marginal farmers aren't likely to be targets for corporate investment," Watkins said. "Corporate investment is not a silver bullet for food security in Africa."

Africa's salvation won't come from Camp David but from African farmers and small-scale producers, particularly women. Smallholder farmers need the freedom to pursue their own growing strategies.

Look out for ourselves

Africa is the only region in the world where agricultural production per inhabitant has fallen in the past 20 years, with productivity per hectare two times lower than the average for developing countries. Fertiliser use is only 13kg/ha, compared to 190kg/ha in East Asia, according to the FAO. Despite Africa's huge rivers and water resources, only 3% of the land is irrigated, compared to more than 20% in the rest of the world. Both the quality and quantity of food are wanting, with sub-Saharan Africa home to 239 million of the world's 925 million undernourished people in 2010.  Zimbabwe's agriculture minister Joseph Made announced in early March that 500,000ha of this season's maize crop – about one-third of the total area planted – has been written off because of erratic rainfall.

African governments have failed to keep to a pledge made in 2003 in Maputo to spend 10% of their budgets on agriculture. Spending hovers around 4%, compared to 11-14% in Asia.

International aid has also failed to materialise. In  2009, the G8 meeting at L'Aquila in Italy launched a three-year food security initiative with a $21.5bn pledge. Amid the sovereign debt crisis that followed, the money has not all materialised and the pledge will soon expire. Indian scientist M. S. Swaminathan – known as the father of Asia's green revolution – has lost faith in these global initiatives. "They've gone on making and making declarations. None of them really fulfil their promise. Countries, if they are going to depend upon assurances of this kind, will never make any progress. They must look out for themselves."

At the next G8 summit at Camp David on 19-20 May, aid agencies are mounting another campaign to prevent a looming crisis in the Sahel where 13 million people are at severe risk of malnutrition. Farmers are also sounding early warnings about failed harvests in the breadbasket of southern Africa.

According to the FAO's food price index of 55 commodities, the price of foodstuffs rose 127% between 2001 and 2011. For the urban and peri-urban poor living near the poverty line, price volatility in local markets injects a harsh uncertainly about where the next meal will come from. Urban families can spend 60-80% of their income on food, according to the FAO. Attempts to fix this problem have brought their own contradictions and imbalances. "The powers that be have deliberately privileged urban populations, and so imports, to the detriment of rural populations," says Mamadou Cissoko, honorary president of the Network of West African Farmer and Producer Organisations.

http://theafricareport.com/index.php/20120504501810768/frontline/how-to-feed-africa-s-two-billion-501810768.html

bend down boutiques

A third of all globally donated clothes end up in sub-Saharan Africa. Nicknamed "junks" in Sierra Leone, hand-me-downs account for the majority of outfits in a country where seven out of 10 people live on less than $2 a day. The industry has ballooned to $1bn in Africa since 1990. Ivory Coast, where around 20 tonnes of secondhand clothes flooded the country last year. In neighbouring Ghana, 10 times that amount arrive in an average year.

Quite apart from the ethical issue of donated goods becoming tradeable commodities on which middlemen can turn a profit, there is the threat to local textile industries, swamping fragile domestic textiles markets to consider. 12 countries in Africa are among 31 globally that have now banned their import.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/07/europes-secondhand-clothes-africa

When America and Al-Shabaab Agreed

When war-torn Somalia was also ravaged by a drought-induced famine last year, which killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million people, international media was quick to blame the Islamist Al-Shabaab for blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching its zone of control in southern Somalia.Although the group undoubtedly prevented assistance from reaching starving famine victims based on its claim that food aid was a Western conspiracy to drive Somali farmers out of business, Menkhaus, a specialist on the Horn of Africa, believes that was not the end of the sordid story. According to Ken Menkhaus, professor of Political Science at Davidson College in North Carolina, the United States’ counter-terrorism laws played an equally central role in obstructing assistance from reaching famine victims in desperate need of aid. Menkhaus said humanitarian organisations suspended food aid delivery to drought- struck areas controlled by Al-Shabaab for fear of violating the USA Patriot Act. Humanitarian groups were fearful that an accusation of "aiding terrorists’ could damage their entire organisation. In reality, the U.S. could have issued a waiver, protecting relief agencies from counter-terrorism laws; similar waivers have been issued for relief agencies in southern Lebanon and the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories, where Hezbollah and Hamas operate respectively. But in the case of Somalia, Menkhaus believes the U.S. administration did not want to give its Republican opponents any political leverage on the eve of upcoming presidential elections by appearing too "soft on terrorism". Instead, the U.S. government prepared a document that purportedly gave relief agencies protection from the law but which, upon close examination by legal experts, was found to contain no such protections, leaving those humanitarian agencies vulnerable to attack under the Patriot Act.

The tragic irony Menkhaus explained  "suspension of food aid into southern Somalia was the only thing that the U.S. government and Al-Shabaab could agree on, to the detriment of (millions) of Somalis" 




The humanitarian agenda is becomes secondary to the political agenda.
By 2008 Somalia was the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian aid workers. "One-third of all humanitarian casualties occurred not in Afghanistan or in Iraq but in Somalia," Menkhaus said. The Kenyan refugee camp of Dadaab, with a population of 520,000, is now Kenya’s third largest city, and completely unsustainable. In addition, destitute nomads and farmers who can no longer find livelihoods in rural areas are drifting into urban centres. These people, who come with no technical skills into a barren employment landscape, are forming huge slums of several hundred thousand people in villages that previous housed only a few thousand residents.


http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107508

Haiti - “The Republic of NGOs,”

Africans can learn from the experience of Haiti when it comes to foreign aid promises. Haiti is a formerly French colonial island nation occupying a little less than half of the Caribbean island originally called Hispanola (the other half of the island, the Dominican Republic, is a former Spanish colony). The island soon became a critical stop in the slave trade in the Americas, with its capital, Port-au-Prince, being one of the most popular hubs. The colonial overseers grew rich, exporting sugar and coffee to the world. By 1804, due to several slave uprisings, the poor natives overthrew French rule and became the first free nation in Latin America. Like other new democratic successes of the Atlantic World, the Haitians discovered self-determination. They also discovered debt, saddled with a French demand for 150 million francs (more than $20 billion in today’s terms) to compensate the colonial power for its lost territory.

The world pledged some $12 billion after the 2010 earthquake to Haiti . Two years later, little has been used to actually rebuild the country. According to reports by Oxfam, the UN, the U.S. Government Accountability Office and international aid experts interviewed by GlobalPost, billions of dollars of aid were pledged to Haiti’s reconstruction, but promises of funding have not translated into money on the ground. Of the original $1.4 billion allocated by the US Congress, according to a most recent GAO report, $655 million in funds was reimbursed to the Department of Defense. Another $220 million went to repay the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. $350 million went to disaster assistance (an umbrella term that includes everything from medical care to sanitation); $150 million to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (for emergency food and forward-thinking agricultural programs in Haiti); and $15 million to the Department of Homeland Security for Immigration fees and aircraft fares for the lucky few Haitian refugees brought to the United States.

“In the end,” says Robert Fatton Jr., professor of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia “...if you read the reports — the UN Report and so on — you’ll see that actual Haitians got less than 1 percent of all the American money pledged.” In other words, Fatton explained, “99 percent of [the U.S. money spent] went back to the U.S. military, the State Department, NGOs and contractors. The money was clearly intended for Haiti, but it ended up returning to the same place it came from.”

Expanding the picture doesn’t change it. The UN Special Envoy for Haiti reported that of the overall $2.4 billion pledged by the UN for humanitarian efforts in Haiti, 34 percent (or $864 million) of those funds were given back to donor civil and military organizations, 28 percent (or $672 million) was laid out to UN and non-governmental humanitarian projects such as housing and health-care, 26 percent (or $624 million) was given to contractors for things like road-building and infrastructure, and 5 percent ($120 million) was given to various international Red Cross/Red Crescent societies.

As recently as the early 1980s, Haiti was producing just about all of its own rice. Now more than 60 percent is imported from the U.S., making it the fourth largest recipient of American rice exports in the world. That was before the quake and now with donated rice coming in as well, Haiti is even more awash in rice while American agribusiness makes billions of dollars every year through generous government subsidies.

“You might say it is a perfect metaphor for what is wrong with aid to Haiti,” says Marc Cohen, a senior researcher for Oxfam. “Instead of bringing subsidized rice in on ships from Miami, we could be helping Haiti grow rice in its own fields,” explains Cohen, who worked for many years in Haiti with the International Food Policy Research Institute and studied the broad economic impact of U.S. rice subsidies, or “Miami rice,” as it is known here.

If you really want to see the face of humanitarian spending post-earthquake in Haiti — the financial clout of the NGOs — there’s only one place to go: the Toyota dealership in Port-au-Prince. The white Toyota Land Cruiser is perhaps the ultimate symbol of international interventional power. And in and around Port-au-Prince, the vehicles are omnipresent.

How much does one cost?“Each one, with taxes, is $61,100,” she says. “If you have tax-free status, you can get them for less, but then you have to take them with you or give them away here. If you pay the taxes, you can just sell the car.”

And how many do you sell a year?

“This year, we sold 250 of this model. But, you know, right after the earthquake, for several months, we were probably selling that many Land Cruisers every month. Maybe twice that many.”

250 Land Cruisers at $61,000 each is upward of $15 million dollars. So even if they sold only a few more Land Cruisers in 2010 after the first few months (and you have to assume they did) plus the 2011 sales numbers so far , conservatively speaking that’s a gross cash influx in the neighborhood of $100 million in the last two years (though of course, some will have to go to taxes). Add to that the repair and maintenance fees, and you’re looking at maybe $110 million. Maybe $150 million. And that’s a conservative estimate.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/11/haiti_where_did_the_aid_go/

a capitalist failure

Thousands of needless deaths occurred from famine in East Africa last year because the international community failed to heed early warnings. Oxfam and Save the Children say it took more than six months for aid agencies to act on warnings of imminent famine.

"Many donors wanted proof of a humanitarian catastrophe before acting to prevent one," the report says. "Sophisticated early warning systems first forecast a likely emergency as early as August 2010, but the full-scale response was not launched until July 2011." By that time it says, "malnutrition rates in parts of East Africa had gone far beyond the emergency threshold and there was high profile media coverage of the crisis"

Between 50,000 and 100,000 people died in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia. At one stage during the famine the United Nations estimated that 10 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance.

Oxfam's Chief Executive, Barbara Stocking said "It is shocking that the poorest people are still bearing the brunt of a failure to respond swiftly and decisively."

Save the Children's Chief Executive, Justin Forsyth, said clear warnings had been ignored. "We can no longer allow this grotesque situation to continue; where the world knows an emergency is coming but ignores it until confronted with TV pictures of desperately malnourished children"

Dependence Syndrome

In the past, it was said and often repeated that Africa was inflicted by three crippling scourges, namely poverty, hunger and disease. Unfortunately, the three severely handicapping scourges are still prevalent.

Most African leaders have steered their governments into the unpredictable and costly dependence syndrome. Many of these leaders and their bureaucrats continue to be seen in the capitals of the developed and developing worlds with begging cups in hand. On their return home, they jubilate and exhibit their triumphs in having convinced their counterparts in the former worlds to part with crumbs under their rich tables, in exchange for the surrender of local raw materials which consist of wealth.

Today, the dependence syndrome in Africa has come to mean the surrender of valuable national assets in return for cheap trinkets and poorly designed and manufactured transient goods and equipment. The African continent continue to rely heavily on expatriate experts and money with their programmes of participation, personnel and paraphernalia, sometimes alien models of development have been thrust upon Africa while implementing international or bilateral agreements. These are agreements that invariably favour the donor rather than the receiving host country.

Consequently, the dependence syndrome exacerbates instead of reducing the three scourges of poverty, ignorance and disease.

EXTRACTED AND re-EDITED FROM HERE