Dead Aid

In an article relating to the U.S. plan to assist the people of Afghanistan, it says

“Afghanistan's president Tuesday praised U.S. plans to provide more civilian
help to his country, and expressed hope that the country becomes less dependent
on international partners in coming years.”

I would like to highlight the president’s use of the words ‘less dependent’, because as I have mentioned before, the result of dependency is a key argument against international aid programs. However, if distributed in the right way, aid can be used effectively, encouraging the development of a self-sufficient country instead of a country dependent upon aid and unable to dig themselves out of a hole that they did not create.

For example, there are hundreds of microfinance institutions, which help people all over the world help themselves. Instead of just handing the poor world objects needed to survive, microfinance institutions or ‘the poor man’s bank’ hand them the tools to build their own future. They do this by giving out loans and grants of small sums of money to impoverished people to enable them to start a business and create lives for themselves. Microfinance helps to create a sustainable future, instead of one shredded by dependency.

In fact most aid organizations are mending their methods of aid, aiming on giving self-sufficiency, instead of hand outs. For example, USAID, an independent federal government aid distribution agency, provide women in Afghanistan with the tools to earn a living through 86 bakeries, employing a growing total of 896 poor women. Additionally USAID has worked on sustainability projects in Afghanistan such as constructing 2,700 kilometers of roads so that 60% of Afghanis now live approximately 50 kilometers of the newly constructed ring road. USAID are also working on increasing the amount of Afghanis that have electricity, as currently it stands at a mere 15%.

In this very recent CNN video, Dambisa Moyo, the author of ‘Dead Aid’, a book that calls for a change in aid strategy, says we are living in an “aid dependent world.” She argues that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest the aid creates jobs for Africans.

However, we can see from the work done by USAID and microfinance institutions, that if aid is used in the right way, it can definitely create jobs. Dambisa Moyo says that the right way to go about getting rid of aid is introducing an increasingly free market. She says she would like aid to decrease in hopes of creating more sustainable countries that don’t have to depend on aid. If only it were that easy.

Neglect in Tanzania

An ammunition dump of the outskirts of the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam exploded. The death toll stands currently at 20, however more than 1,000 people were injured in the explosion, 300 of which are currently in critical care at the local hospital. In an article by the BBC entitled ‘Tanzania blast victims demand aid,’ it explains how the survivors of the crisis, which happened last week, are still waiting for emergency relief.

The unsettling thing about this story is that it is Tanzania’s own government that pledged to help compensate all those affected by the blast, and it is the government that is failing to fulfill their pledge. Many local residents of Dar es Salaam are yet to be provided with adequate food and shelter. They are inhumanely being forced to live in the dangerous ruins of their crumbling homes whilst they wait for the government to pull themselves together.

A local man, whose home was largely destroyed in the explosion, and who is still looking for his missing child, has this to say:

“I went to register [for aid] so officers could come here to assess the damage,
but to date I have neither seen the camp leader nor the area governmental
person. I spent the whole day yesterday at home. I have not seen anyone."

More than half of the dead were children, many of whom drowned in a river in the panic following the blast. It is estimated that hundreds of people, mainly children, are yet to be reunited with their families. The only aid team on the scene helping to distribute aid, and provide services, is the Red Cross.

The Role of the Media

Years after natural disasters, the need for aid still lingers. Hurricane Katrina victims and hurricane Ike victims are still in need of care and shelter. Aid quickly becomes a small priority when the terrible natural disaster loses its drama and floats its way out of the media. This is a problem.

This recent article from the BBC, reports that hundreds of thousands of people in Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta (east of India) still need assistance- a year after the deadly cyclone. Cyclone Nargis killed about 140,000 people in 2008 and more than 2 million people were left homeless. The cyclone that flew across the fields of Burma was a disaster comparable to the Asian tsunami.

“Yet the amounts of aid being requested are just a fraction of what is being
spent on countries like Indonesia after the tsunami- and not much is forthcoming
yet.”

The UN have made an appeal of $ 700 million for reconstruction in February, however so far they have received less than $100 million.

The article pin points the problem in lack of public awareness of the crisis. There are actually around 60 aid agencies at work in Burma, even a year after the disaster, and yet we do not hear about it. This problem is rooted in the fact that most foreign journalists have been banned from reporting in Burma. Another problem is that the public are skeptical of where there money is going, because of Burma’s military government who are increasingly suspicious of foreign involvement in their country. Therefore, the public are worried that their money will be going into the wrong hands. This is despite the fact that the director of STC (save the children) has assured that he is absolutely confident that aid will not be sent into the hands of the military government.

Many cyclone victims in Burma are still living in poorly constructed shelters that are suffering from salt contamination. Additionally, the reconstruction project in Burma has barely begun.

Another situation that has been ignored and only thrust into the spotlight due to a person in government is the humanitarian situation in Haiti. One of the western hemisphere’s poorest nations is in dire need of aid after a year of hurricanes and food riots. Despite its apparently relatively successful economy, there is a hugely uneven distribution of wealth in Haiti and 70 percent on the population are unemployed.

Hilary Clinton wants to pledge $57 million towards Haiti, to help it build roads, create jobs, help with food shortages, and provide relief for recent hurricanes.

An additional country that has been in the news recently due to its need for aid is Somalia. Up to 3 million people in Somalia (half the population) are in need of food aid.

“They don’t have access to basic services, they don’t have access to clean
water. They are in need of emergency assistance that the government cannot
provide.”

Recent lack of aid has been mainly due to the fact that aid workers have been killed, as some Muslim regions of the country are not willing to work with aid agencies.

Model UN reflection

Having never done anything like the model UN simulation before, I thought it was particularly interesting. Especially as prior to it, I knew absolutely nothing about the country of Kuwait. I also feel that my knowledge about the relations of the Middle East has increased substantially. I mostly enjoyed the parts of the simulation where we had a major crisis to solve because it was fun to be able to exercise so much pretend power and also to have your voice heard on potentially real life situations. It was also a good way to hear about everyone else’s area of interest in Kuwait (for example, the economy, defense or education). It was fun to be able to experience what goes into the decision making process, and how many things come into play when making decisions that effect an entire nation of people, or even multiple countries.

I think I was sufficiently prepared; I knew lots of details about my ministry and knew basic facts and foreign policy about Kuwait. However, I could have improved my knowledge by reading everyone else’s blog entries about Kuwait as to have a slightly more rounded perception of the country.

I was most proud of how our group handled our crises very realistically on the first day of the simulation. We were not too generous to the people or too lenient on the workers. We were firm, but not uncooperative. I think we were very good at acting as Kuwait might really have acted, taking the views of our population into consideration with the reorganization of the government and with the workers crisis, and not just giving into our power hungry, foreign policy minded inner desires to dominate the Middle East.

Also, I thought our group was very good at not allowing just one person to dominate all decision making. Almost everyone spoke out on the first day and most people got to talk about their particular ministry and were useful in decision making not only if it applied to their ministry, but everything in general. Many people voiced opinions and showed knowledge in areas that they didn’t focus on.

Our group also made sure to look at news releases not concerning our own country, because you never know when something could come along that could mean great profit for our nation. For example, the Iranian post about oil found off the coast of their country which allowed us to join forces with Iraq and the USA was a very handy one. It would not have been good if we had ignored that piece of information especially as Kuwait’s rich economy almost runs singlehandedly on oil supply. Also we gave out aid on a few occasions, which was my area of expertise, when news releases came out about the spread of disease or of famine in Iraq. This helped to keep ourselves alive in the simulation and to ensure our survival in the core part of the events.

I think the simulation could have gone much better if the organizers had more people on staff because then news could have been approved and posted faster and therefore there would be more things we might be able to react/respond to. On the second day we weren’t given any crises therefore we were forced to try to play off of other country’s situations in order to get ourselves back into the center of the simulation. Towards the end, in a desperate plea for recognition, we planned a celebratory boat party where we planned to assassinate the prime minister of China. Overall the people in charge could definitely have been more organized, or had some potential crises ready to give out in case of a countries lack of things to deal with, particularly countries like Kuwait who are not an especially large player in the international system.

Aiding Ourselves?

When I type ‘aid’ into the BBC news search, I find it interesting that it comes up with a number of stories about aiding companies or aiding sports teams. We are spending hundred of millions in order to keep up our precious capitalism (do not worry, I am not a socialist). We are giving aid to ourselves.

Imagine if we got rid of just one multimillion dollar corporation, and used the money to aid the rest of the world. Yes, thousands of people would lose their jobs, but we may be saving the lives of a thousand others. Imagine just getting rid of one huge corporation, one manufacturer who make things unbreakable in order for us to break them and have to buy new things (or a company that is already exploiting its employees), can change a lot.

This article from the BBC, talks about money that is being funded so that lil’ ol’ Darlington Football Club can be reestablished, which is 5 million pounds in debt. The article talks about how when each person buys a ticket, the money will go towards the club and its establishment. We in the west so eagerly feed our local communities because then they feed us with entertainment. We feed ourselves when we could feed the impoverished world.

That article came out this month, within the very same week that this article came out, addressing starvation issues in the prisons of Zimbabwe.

“Dozens of inmates in Zimbabwe die every day of starvation and disease.”

We could possibly help them in their plea for humanitarian aid needed for ‘food and clothing’, however we would all appear (including myself) to be too busy aiding ourselves with entertainment and additional merchandise.

A documentary was made about the conditions of the prisons in Zimbabwe. In the documentary prisoners describe how the sick and the healthy sleep side-by-side in unhygienic and overcrowded cells. These conditions seem to arguably reflect the conditions that the people were held in at a school during the Cambodian genocide, in which hardly anyone who went in survived. Things like this are happening all over the world. We give money to aid football teams, to help attention deprived sports stars, when other people are life threateningly food deprived.

I know that it is hard to truly feel the effects of what we are doing; it is hard for everyone to feel for the rest of the world because it simply doesn’t affect us, doesn’t apply to us. The western world (again, including me) finds it hard to deplete even the smallest bit of self consumption. After all, we are a consuming nation. We aim to fill our wants, when less developed nations merely seek fulfillment of their needs.

On the CNN website, when I type in ‘aid’, I find a number of different things. But what I found that was most alarming was that a story entitled ‘what you eat can improve your health, mind and appearance’ was sitting right next to a story entitled ‘Quake survivors: what about our future?’. This is the part where we ignore the question and say well, what about my hair?!

Kuwait: Aid and KFAED

Due to Kuwait possessing roughly 10% of the world’s oil supply, even though it is very small, it has become one of the worlds’ richest countries. Therefore Kuwait’s has the potential to deliver lots of foreign aid, which is does, in large amounts. A significant part of Kuwait’s revenue gets invested in foreign aid every year, primarily to Arab states due to the well used Kuwait Fund for Arab Economic Development (KFAED), which was established in 1961. The main concern of KFAED is to help fellow developing countries, and to promote friendly relations between them and Kuwait.

During the Iraq-Iran war, KFAED began aiming their efforts towards Iraq. During the 1980s Kuwait lent an estimate of $13 billion dollars to Iraq, which is almost as much as the USAID lent (United States Agency for International Development). By 2004, they had lent $16 billion dollars to Iraq, and yet KFAED announced that they were prepared to wave away “a significant portion” of the debt owed to it by Iraq. The creation of KFAED set a benchmark as the first developing country with an aid agency. This argues that the less developed, rich countries can play a role in the international community and that they are not helpless. They are more than happy to come to the aid of their neighboring countries, just as America, the world’s superpower in our current unipolar international system, aids the rest of the world.

Kuwait is playing its part in the international community. More recently, as of March 2009, KFAED is loaning the Sudanese government a total of $217 million dollars to help build a hydroelectric dam, one of Sudan’s largest development project ever. Also recently, KFEAD agreed to loan Yemen $14 million towards their social development program which aims to combat unemployment, poverty and increase the income of low-income families. On top of this KFAED managed a $2.5 million dollar grant to Yemen to rebuild homes that were destroyed in an earthquake.

A significant change came in 1974 when they began to expand foreign aid to developing countries worldwide. In totally they have given aid to 101 countries around the globe including 40 African countries and 34 Asian and European countries. In general, loans are primarily targeted at the development of water, agriculture, transport and energy. In 2005 KFAED sponsored the building of a hospital in Bahrain, a power station in Jordan, an irrigation project in Albania and many road projects in several African countries. One of the most interesting distributions of aid from Kuwait was in fact the giving of $500 million dollars of aid in the form of oil products and humanitarian assistance, to US hurricane victims in 2005. This is particularly surprising because the majority of their aid is focused upon the middle east and Africa, and the US do not have a very good reputation with Muslim countries, arguably being perceived as a big bully to Muslim countries in the Middle East. Sheikh Ahmed said this was due to an opportunity “to express faithfulness to our friends and allies who stood on our side in difficult times”. I assume this is in reference to America’s assistance in the liberation of Kuwait, or when US military aid was sent to Kuwait in 1987 to help protect Kuwait from Iranian attacks.

There is also the Kuwait Red Crescent Society (KRCS), which also participated in aid to the United States after hurricane Katrina. The Red Cross reports that KRCS gave them a $25 million dollar donation in February 2006, after the devastating hurricane. At that time it was the single largest recorded donation ever received by the Red Cross from any group or any country. Dr. Hilal Al-Sayer, Vice President of the Kuwait Red Crescent Society, was apparently so moved by the hurricane destruction, he actually visited the Red Cross group in New Orleans. He was able to see, first hand, how the Kuwait aid was being spent. It was spent effectively on the manufacture of hundreds of new ERV’s (Emergency Response Vehicles), which enabled the Red Cross to deliver food and shelter and other humanitarian aid much more effectively to the needy population. Dr. Hilal Al-Sayer was passionately pleased with this use of their aid. The Chairman of the American Red Cross, Bonnie McElveen, is reported having said “How grateful we are in America to have the wonderful friendship of the magnificent people of Kuwait.” I never even knew this friendship existed, and I still find it quite strange, especially as Kuwait is so closely linked with Iraq, who is the primary recipient of their aid.

The Kuwait Red Crescent Society was founded in 1966 and it aims to achieve social and medical welfare for all needy people, without discrimination, and to provide help and rescue operations during crisis caused by natural or human disasters. One of their greatest achievements was the leading role they took in responding to the Tsunami of December 2004. Currently the KRCS are committed to supplying humanitarian aid to the displaced people of Darfur. In 2007 they delegated $1 million dollars for rehabilitating basic services in Darfur. Earlier, in 2002, Kuwait pledged $30 million dollars to help rebuild Afghanistan that had been plagued by 23 years of war and devastation. Kuwait has also been known to consistently send large portions of aid to Lebanon who is being afflicted by the Israeli war on their country. In particular, in 2006 KRCS sent a convoy of 440 tons of food supplies, tents and blankets to needy Lebanese families.

Kuwait gives out an impressive amount of aid, especially for a developing country, and especially due to the fact that it is a tax free state. In addition to this, the aid is aimed towards development, which helps less developed countries gradually become sustainable. However, one must consider whether or not this non-discriminatory, developmental based aid from Kuwait will be able to continue. After all, more than 90% of their wealthy economy is based on oil exports and oil is a worryingly nonrenewable energy source. Without their oil trade, there will be no budget surplus, therefore the deliverance of international aid will be much, much more difficult to achieve. Perhaps in the future they will be the ones in need of aid, and hopefully many will come to help them, just as they once helped to aid everyone else.

Exercising Power through Aid

It has been argued that US aid is given to reward political and military partners rather than to advance genuine economic and humanitarian causes abroad. Arguably, it has a two-fold purpose of furthering America’s foreign policy in expanding democracy and free markets, while conveniently it also improves the lives of those in the developing countries.

Additionally, USAID (United States agency for international development) only gave out 12.3% of its budget as humanitarian aid in 2004. However, impressively, 30.1% of it went to bilateral or developmental aid.

I don’t mean to be completely negative about the US commitment to aid because they are still the worlds’ greatest aid loaner. As it states in this BBC article, recently the US government gave out a very large sum of money ($900 million) to Gaza. Additionally, they are being extremely careful about making sure the aid does not go to their current ‘terrorist’ government (The Hamas). In fact, so careful, to the extent that some Congress members were hesitant about giving the large donation to Gaza just in case it ended up in the wrong hands. This proves that the US realizes the risk and how aid can be mistreated by corrupt governments.

Instead the aid will be shared between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the United Nations and the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. I believe the UN is a great place to invest aid in because with more funds, they have the very possible potential to be a really significant peacekeeping force, just like they could have been if they were aided with the genocide in Rwanda.

The article describes the need for aid in Gaza, stating:

Around 1,300 Palestinians, of whom 412 were children, were killed during the
Israeli offensive on Gaza; 21,000 homes were destroyed or badly damaged.
Thirteen Israelis were killed during the three weeks of violence.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Last year there appeared a very interesting article about how the US had offered Cuba $5 million in relief aid after their hurricane, but they refused to receive it. After this refusal, they persisted and asked Cuba to reconsider, however they did not. But the US did not give at that, they licensed agricultural exports to Cuba worth $250 million to be used as lumber for reconstruction. This shows that the US does genuinely have their eyes on the lookout for humanity outside of its own, even humanity governed by a socialist regime.

However, the article didn’t say why Cuba insisted upon refusing aid from America. One can only be suspicious of political conditions that may or may not have been attached to the large aid package. It is possible however that the Cuban government simply didn’t want help from a country whose political ideology is different from their own.

This is a way that powerful countries exercise their power: through giving aid, or through giving aid with attachments or conditions. Dependency theorists argue that the giving of aid only increases states instability because they can no longer function on their own two feet; they become dependent on aid, dependant on the powerful. These countries that are dependent on aid arguably have no choice but to abide by the rules of the powerful and agree to their ideological system, because otherwise they may not survive.

Aid, a device originated for good, can be used as a tool for domination.