Når man skal hjælpe verdens skrøbelige og svage stater, bør der så være andre standarder for, hvad man retteligt kan forvente?
LONDON, 2 August 2011 (IRIN):- When the fourth high-level forum on aid effectiveness holds its next session in the South Korean port town of Busan in November, the issue of how successfully development aid can, and should, be discussed will be high on the agenda.
Aid measurements cannot be “dumbed down” (nedtonet), say analysts, particularly in fragile states.
The aid effectiveness debate is high on many donor radars and is particularly lively in the UK where the government promised to maintain its level of development aid, despite the economic recession.
At a meeting on aid effectiveness in London on 25 July, Sarah Cliffe, World Bank director responsible for the World Development Report, said that on recent visits to the rest of Europe she had found what she called “a sense of amazement” that the UK had maintained its commitment to aid levels through the financial crisis.
Aid budgets of the Netherlands, Austria, DENMARK, Greece, South Korea, Portugal and Ireland all shrunk for the second year running in 2011.
Value for money
The UK government’s answer has been to stress how determined it is to get “Value for Money” from the assistance it gives, making this the main criterion for judging aid programmes.
It is a demand that weighs heavily on developing country partners, which are constantly under pressure to demonstrate that the donor is getting full value from every penny spent, however difficult the circumstances.
John Morlu, until recently Liberia’s auditor general (rigsrevisor), is despairing about the “Value for Money” agenda when it is applied to countries like his:
– I am the auditor general of a fragile state and you are asking me to do `Value for Money’? There are no criteria. South Africa can do `Value for Money’; they have national accounts. We do not. It all comes down to understanding local realities.
Sue Unsworth, formerly with the UK Department for International Development (DfID), now a principal with advisory group The Policy Practice, talks of the fundamental dishonesty of presenting everything in terms of measurable results and the inherent (iboende) assumption that development challenges are simply about lack of finance and skill and so something which external donors can deal with.
“Dumbed down” aid?
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