Hård kritik af bistanden til Bangladesh: Når den de fattigste?

“The way foreign aid is spent here cannot reduce poverty,” Anu Muhammad, professor of economics at Jahangirnagar University in the capital, Dhaka, told IRIN, adding:

“It seems the objective is not to reduce poverty but rather benefit a very small interest group of bureaucrats and consultants.”

While the rate of poverty fell by 8 percent from 2005-2010 the UN estimated some 58 percent of the South asian country’s 150 million people were still poor in 2011 as measured by access to health, education and safe living conditions.

In 2010 Bangladesh was the 22nd largest recipient of humanitarian aid globally and received 1,4 billion dollar in both development and humanitarian aid that year.

Linda Poole, programme leader of global humanitarian assistance at the UK-based NGO Development Initiatives, put the aid figure into perspective.

“Official development assistance funding from international donors… to address chronic poverty and vulnerability to crises is relatively modest in relation to the scale of poverty and the numbers of people periodically affected by natural disasters”, she noted.

One of the aims of foreign aid is to prepare communities to withstand – and survive – disasters.

According to the Brussels-based Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, since 2000 nearly 100 natural disasters have killed an estimated 9.500 people in Bangladesh.

The country is ranked one of the 10 most vulnerable – but least prepared – nations worldwide to natural disasters, according to the UK-based global risk assessment company, Maplecroft.

Malnutrition (fejlernæring)