Reviews
Does Foreign Aid Really Work?
Roger C Riddell
OUP, 536pp
Official development aid today has to fulfil many conditions, obscuring its underlying moral purpose. But morality remains one of them, and this may be why it still has strong public support. It is however astonishing that the aid budget has climbed nearer to the UN target through an all-party consensus, relatively undisturbed by select committees and auditors. Can this situation remain?
I recently attended a meeting in Westminster addressed by Jacques Diouf, head of the FAO, the UN’s largest bureaucracy. I was amazed to see that he attracted so many students and researchers that many had to sit on the floor. They wanted to know why world food prices were hitting the poor so hard and what rich countries were doing about it. The answer was, as usual: not enough, but that it would all be decided at a high level in due course.
This is not good enough for supporters of ‘Make Poverty History’ or anyone else who wants to see more assistance going to the people who need it. But governments are now so determined to impose even on the poorest countries such conditions as ‘transparency’, ‘good governance’ and ‘rule of law’ that more and more aid has been delayed, suspended or refined through local channels and voluntary organisations.
Roger Riddell is one of the most valuable witnesses and impartial critics of foreign aid today. He is a trained economist with considerable hands-on experience in the public and private sectors. He was not only international director of Christian Aid for five years (1999-2004) but he spent 15 years before that at the Overseas Development Institute and chaired the first economic commission in Zimbabwe back in 1980.
This book draws on an armoury of references and is a sequel to his earlier masterpiece Foreign Aid Reconsidered, now also covering NGOs and bringing together a wide range of experience and analysis. It is a pleasure to consult, whether or not you have worked in this field, because it provides instant answers for lay students who resent too much academic rigour.
The book should be read closely by potential donors because, in the board game of foreign aid, the author neatly reveals the snakes pulling us all down the aid ladders. For example he freely admits corruption happens all over the world, saying it would be unrealistic not to expect it in any country, recalling that in New Orleans in 2005 as much as 16% of aid to hurricane victims was lost to fraud.
Our own DfID will be scrutinising the chapter on the effectiveness of official aid projects. It lists spectacular successes such as the WHO’s campaign against river blindness, and failures like the unused EU abattoirs in Madagascar.
It outlines the problems of evaluation and targeting: UNDP, for example, has only recently come halfway to meet its criteria of sustainability. It explains how conditionality has come full circle in countries like Ethiopia where the trend towards trusting the government through the use of programme aid, either sectoral or through budget support, has been reversed on grounds of human rights.
The ethical dimension of aid is a fascinating aspect of this book. Many NGOs have moved, according to Riddell, from their primary concern of meeting human need to a rights-based and even systemic analysis of poverty, requiring more fundamental political solutions. Governments are increasingly recognising the effectiveness of NGOs as service providers. In cases where NGOs have taken over the moral and physical responsibility of government – and in many areas of poverty this is literally true – their monopoly of services brings with it a deeper responsibility for the whole community without the legal accountability that is expected of government.
For someone who has worked closely with NGOs and is sympathetic to them, Riddell is also quite frank about their limitations. He says there are too many of them, of varying quality. Assessing their impact remains ‘more an art than a science’. Blind support for ‘civil society’ could have the opposite effect of making society uncivil and government unworkable.
He is also sceptical about the ability of the financial institutions to cope with social policy in developing countries, pointing out that the IMF has still not learned how to implement poverty reduction strategies.
This work should not, and will not, sit on library shelves, it is going to be a must for aid workers and contributors to church collections and appeals for many years to come.
John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich
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