Is there any need for EU aid money?

By Judith Crosbie

Date: 22/06/06

Debates on development focus mostly on aid-targets, policy instruments, campaigns and the best way to deliver aid. But a simpler question pops up now and again that goes to the heart of the development issue: does aid really work?

Countries that seem continually to have famines and wars, food programmes that appear to go on forever and perpetual alarms over droughts and disease prompt some to question whether the billions that the developed economies pump into the developing world is achieving anything. Indeed some think aid can actually cause more harm than good.

William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University, is one of the doubters. He is the author of The White Man's Burden: why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good.

He argues that while rich countries have spent $2.3 trillion on foreign aid over the last fifty years they have "still not managed to get twelve-cent medicines to children to prevent half of all malaria deaths".

Those at the front line of delivering aid on the other hand insist that aid does work, and that it is desperately needed.

Oxfam contends that development aid has saved million of lives over the decades. "From the late 1960s, more than $100 million was targeted to eradicate smallpox - a feat achieved worldwide by 1980," according to the Oxfam report Paying the Price: why rich countries must invest on a war on poverty. The report says that millions of children in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia now attend school thanks to aid funding. Aid can, the report adds, help political situations also such as disarming soldiers and repatriating refugees in Mozambique and supporting indigenous groups in Bolivia to lobby the government for services.

In an attempt to prevent inculcating a dependency on aid, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) arranges "work-for-food" programmes in which locals are involved in projects in return for receiving food aid. A road-building scheme in Ethiopia helped hungry farmers to get access to villages and towns, says WFP spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume. Aid provides an incentive to get children to come to school who might otherwise have to go to work to pay for essentials at home, she adds.

Despite the prevailing orthodoxy that that giving aid is important, the quest to make it more effective continues. Last year more than one hundred donor and developing countries signed up to the Paris Declaration which, through indicators and targets, will try to make aid work better. The plan will give developing countries more control over their development policies but in return they must give greater transparency on how the aid is used.

Building on that declaration, the Commission made proposals in March to improve aid effectiveness, emphasising co-ordinating procedures and policies and increasing joint activities among member states.

Those involved in bringing the aid to the world's poorest stress that a focus on aid effectiveness must not deflect attention from funding commitments. As the Oxfam report warns: "Increases in aid budgets can and must go hand- in-hand with improvements in the way that aid is delivered."

Author asks the fundamental question whether development aid really works.
Article is part of a European Voice Special Report, 'EU development policy'.