Major chunk of new Western aid in last decade goes to Iraq and Afghanistan
LONDON (AlertNet) - Billions of dollars in aid have been spent on projects that are expensive, unsustainable and sometimes even dangerous, because donor governments are increasingly using the money to support their short-term military and security goals, international aid agency Oxfam said on Thursday.
The neutrality and safety of aid workers is compromised if local people see humanitarian and development funding as a tool of the military, the charity says in a report. It notes that 225 aid workers were killed, kidnapped or injured in attacks during 2010, up from 85 in 2002, partly reflecting a rise in politically motivated violence.
Oxfam's report, called Whose Aid is it Anyway?, says this problem isn't new, but the impact of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside aid policy shifts, are exacerbating the trend.
"Effective aid helps save lives, protect rights and build livelihoods. Yet in conflicts and politically unstable settings from Afghanistan to Yemen, life-saving humanitarian assistance and longer-term efforts to reduce poverty are being damaged where aid is used primarily to pursue donors' own narrow political and security objectives," it says.
The focus by some donors on countries and regions seen as threatening their geopolitical interests means that other equally insecure, impoverished and conflict-afflicted places - like Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Somalia - are being neglected, Oxfam argues.
Between 2002 and 2008, 41 percent of the $178 billion in additional aid – calculated by comparing each year with a 2001 baseline - provided by wealthy donor nations in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development went to Iraq and Afghanistan alone, with the remainder shared out between 150 other developing countries, according to the report.
In the same period, humanitarian aid per person for the Democratic Republic of Congo has been no more than a twelfth of that spent in Iraq in some years, even though thousands of Congolese civilians die every year as a result of conflict, and per capita income in the African nation is more than 10 times lower than in Iraq.
In war-torn Somalia, U.S. humanitarian assistance dropped eight-fold between 2008 and 2010 after Washington listed the Islamist armed groups controlling most of central and southern Somalia as terrorists and feared they could capture the aid, the report says.
"Both in Europe and North America, aid policies and programmes skewed by donors' foreign policy and national-security interests are beginning to be formally embedded in international development strategies and humanitarian practices," it warns.
In the United States, Canada and France, foreign policy biases have been formally written into aid policies and funding decisions since 2001, Oxfam says. And Britain, Australia and the European Union could soon follow suit under new international development strategies, it warns.
"The stark lesson from the last decade is that politicising aid during conflicts does more harm than good," Kirsty Hughes, Oxfam's head of policy, said in a statement. "Ill thought-out 'politicised' projects alienate the very people whose 'hearts and minds' they seek to win."
MISDIRECTED PROJECTS
The report lists some examples where politically motivated aid work has gone wrong, cost too much, or failed to respond to need:
* Following the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the Spanish army's vaccination programme and water distribution were over 18 times more expensive than comparable civilian efforts, which the military partly duplicated.
* In the Horn of Africa, the US army's "Combined Joint Task Force", originally formed to help regional governments combat terrorism, has focused 60 per cent of its activities on short-term civil affairs projects like school-building and veterinary assistance. A government review earlier this year found these were not tied to specific objectives, and there was no follow up to see whether they were effective. In one case in Kenya, staff discovered a dilapidated school that had been forgotten about.
* Since late 2009, in the wake of an attempted attack on a U.S. airline reportedly linked to Yemeni militants, Washington has dramatically increased aid to Yemen, but it is concentrated in sparsely populated southern districts where joint strikes against militant Islamists have taken place, and not where most of the poorest people live.
The report says "quick impact" projects carried out by foreign troops to win over local populations often construct highly visible infrastructure like school buildings or markets without supporting the "software", such as teachers, which enables long-term development.
Oxfam praises Britain for following better practices than many other major donors, having shifted its Afghanistan strategy towards funding healthcare and education facilities that are owned and run by communities themselves.
But in a press release, it warns of the "danger the UK will increasingly use aid to pursue foreign policy objectives" after the coalition government brought aid for priority countries under the scrutiny of the new National Security Council in mid-2010, and required its development ministry to show that aid is making the "maximum possible contribution to national security".
A spokesperson for the Department for International Development (DFID) said British aid spending follows "strict international rules ensuring our help targets the poorest and most vulnerable", a vast number of whom are trapped in conflict-hit countries, and "we make no apology for helping them".
The Oxfam report has been released at a time when the British government is carrying out three major reviews of its aid policies - one of which assesses humanitarian and emergency response - which are due to be published in the next two months.
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