[b]The lie that is foreign aid[/b]
By Chris Wamalwa, Delaware, USA
A new report by development experts has revealed that Kenya is among the developing countries that have continued to receive foreign aid that actually benefits the donors.
The report says almost half of all aid remains "phantom". It is either poorly targeted, double counted as debt relief, tied to donor goods and services or badly coordinated and highly conditional.
It shows that much of the current spending is ineffective, over-priced, donor-driven and based on a failed development model.
"Although this ineffectiveness is an open secret within the development community, donors continue to insist on large technical assistance in most projects and programmes they fund.
A report released recently in the US by one of the world’s leading humanitarian and advocacy charities criticised Western countries’ way of giving aid to poor countries.
Technical assistance
The ActionAid USA report indicated that one quarter of the aid provided by rich countries, which is about $20 billion, is expensive and often ineffective.
It rebukes donors for continuing to use technical assistance, as "soft" levers to police and direct the policy agendas of developing country governments or to create ownership of the kind of reforms donors deem suitable.
Donor funded "advisors" have even been brought in to draft supposedly "country owned" poverty reduction strategies," says the damning report.
The report says that in Kenya, local contractors failed to get a share fair of the more than Sh32 billion grant given to the country for the rehabilitation of roads in the country.
Foreign contractors won the contracts for the projects to be carried out on major roads across the country. It is something development experts and those working in non-governmental organisations have strongly criticised.
Domination by foreign contractors
The report says Kenyans have raised queries over contracts domination by foreign contractors.
Part of the funds will be used on the section of the Mombasa Road between Embakasi and Athi River and the Lanet Njoro Stretch on the Nakuru Makutano road. The roads will be made dual carriageways.
Works on the two sections is expected to begin next month and will be funded by the World Bank and the Government.
The section of Athi River to be expanded into a dual carriageway will cost Sh4.2 billion. The 14.5km Lanet-Njoro stretch will cost Sh2.9 billion.
Others in the project include the 35km Maji ya Chumvi-Maritini section where the work has started and Sh2.3 billion, and the Njoro turn-off through Mau Summit to Timboroa, at a cost of Sh4.3 billion
The report says a big chunk of the funds go to Western consultants, research and training instead of going directly to the people who need it most.
Report damning and groundbreaking
Many development experts in Washington hailed the report as damning and groundbreaking.
Another report by ActionAid US last year indicated that rich countries’ ‘technical assistance’, which consists consultancy, research and training, often promoted donor interests and inappropriate solutions.
The report says that spending on western consultancies forms a major part of technical assistance.
In the UK, for example, almost half of technical assistance spending goes to consultants and other experts, the majority of them British.
The report acknowledges that aid can make a real difference to the lives of the world’s poor people but only if it is real and genuinely available to fight poverty.
The Kenyan news report indicates that most work for design, supervision and actual construction of the roads was being, and will be done by companies from China, Switzerland, South Africa, Ireland, France, the US, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy.
Criteria dictated by donors
Kenya’s ministry of Roads and Public works officials explained that the Government had very little leeway as the criteria dictated by donors had favoured foreign companies. They acknowledged, however, that they were more expensive than local contractors.
An expatriate consultant typically costs around $200,000 a year with more than one third of this spent on their children’s school fees and child allowances, a cost that would be avoided if local consultants were used.
In Cambodia, for example, a consultant’s fee was at $17,000 a month while a civil servant’s pay is only $40. In Ghana, even relatively inexperienced consultants earned per day what government officials earned in a month. In Sierra Leone, according to one former UK-funded consultant, daily take-home pay was the same as the Auditor General’s monthly salary.
ActionAid says that while this goes on, local knowledge, which is critical, is usually ignored. In Tanzania for instance, Japanese consultants on an irrigation project introduced the use of diesel pumps that, after a massive increase in fuel costs, have become too expensive for local farmers. The pumps now lie idle.
Need for radical reform
The agency believes that there needs to be radical reform of the way that donors provide Technical Assistance.
In particular, donors must stop trying to control poor countries through the use of technical assistance but instead let them determine their own pathways to development.
Poor countries must have much more choice over how technical assistance funds are spent. They must be given the option of spending aid money on their own poverty reduction or capacity building priorities, rather than expensive western consultants.
Donors must stop assuming that western experts have better ideas about reducing poverty than those experiencing poverty first hand.
