textbook part 5 Flashcards
(33 cards)
Evaluating development aid:
Huge amounts of development aid have been extended by developed countries over the last 50 years.
The obvious question to ask is: have receiver countries fully benefited from this aid?
Unfortunately, there is little data available on which to base a reliable answer to this question. In addition, as indicated in Section 13.1, there is no universal acid test to tell us whether or not the aid has literally paid dividends.
The following are five highly generalised verdicts on development aid.
- The outcomes of development aid have not matched the inputs.
- Three factors might go some way to explaining this discrepancy:
- the inappropriateness of some forms of aid
the siphoning of funds by corruption
a lack of sound governance and, related to this, the civil and political unrest that has characterised the recent histories of too many developing countries. - In the earlier years of development aid there was an emphasis on economic development and on prestige projects, which meant that there was little trickle-down of benefits to the most needy people.
- In more recent times, development aid has been directed more at a grass-roots level and focused on education, skills training and healthcare. The verdict on such aid is altogether more positive.
- There is a school of thought that argues that no matter what form development aid takes, it encourages developing countries to become dependent on donor countries.
- Over the years there has been much debate about the relative merits of bilateral and multilateral aid. The jury is still out on this one.
The Ebola outbreak
- The Ebola outbreak in West Africa was first reported in March 2014 and rapidly became the deadliest occurrence of the disease since its discovery in 1976.
- The epidemic that swept across the region in 2014-15 killed five times more than all other known Ebola outbreaks combined (Figure 13.3).
- Eighteen months on from the first confirmed case, recorded on 23 March 2014, nearly 12,000 people had been reported as having died from the disease in six countries: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Nigeria, Mali and the USA (one aid worker).
- The bulk of the deaths were in the first three countries.
- Six months after the first confirmed case, and with the spread of the disease apparently out of control, the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response (UNMEER) was set up.
- Its purpose was to lead and co-ordinate the international responses of NGOs such as MSF.
Other tasks assigned to UNMEER included:
- locating and monitoring everyone who had come into contact with an Ebola patient
- overseeing the safe burial of Ebola victims
- establishing and equipping treatment centres for the safe treatment of the sick
- organising the transport of medical supplies and personnel
- accessing adequate food supplies in a situation of decreasing food production, rising food prices and closed national borders.
Thanks to the combined efforts of UNMEER, the governments of the Ebola-stricken countries and a number of NGOs, there was a sharp fall in the number of new cases of Ebola during the first half of 2015.
It was beginning to look as if the epidemic was under control.
However, it soon became clear that the decline in new cases had stalled, particularly in Sierra Leone.
The following factors were allowing the virus to continue to spread:
Fear of reporting to the authorities that a family member or friend might have contracted or died from Ebola.
Fatigue with the 24/7 task of carefully following the necessary stringent precautions.
Denial by a hardcore of the population who were strongly resistant to the idea that they needed to change their behaviour.
The region was finally declared Ebola-free in January 2016.
UNMEER is the first ever mission deployed by the UN to tackle a huge health security challenge.
It has since been admitted that its creation came rather late in the day, however, and that action needs to be taken much sooner in any similar future emergencies.
It is clear that such outbreaks will continue until ways are found to totally eradicate the disease.
It will involve the commitment and co-operation of governments as well as the efforts of medical research scientists to come up with a vaccine.
It bodes well if this sort of co-operation continues and possibly expands into a much broader concern about other aspects of human development.
Contrasting outcomes
Whether emergency aid should be considered as an integral part of development aid is debatable.
Certainly, even in the opening decades of the twenty-first century, the world has been confronted by some major natural disasters.
The aid response to the Haiti earthquake of 2010 was examined in Chapter 12 (see page 209).
The evaluation was not altogether positive. Did the aid response to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa four years later do any better?
Trends in economic inequalities
- One of the widespread concerns about development aid has been its broad impact.
- Has it widened or narrowed the gap between the receiving country’s rich and poor?
- It has been suggested that top-down aid has tended to increase the polarisation, while bottom-up aid has done rather more for the poor in terms of access to basic services (safe water and proper sewage disposal), primary education and healthcare.
Table 13.2 shows some of the small amount of data there are about the changing distributions of income within countries:
- It uses the Gini index or coefficient: a decrease in the Gini index for any country indicates a move towards a more even distribution of income.
- The countries in the table were chosen because they happened to be developing countries where suitable data were available.
- The table shows that just over half the sample of fifteen countries showed a decline in the Gini index and, therefore, a narrowing of the gap between rich and poor.
- To put the values in this table into perspective, in 2010 the UK’s Gini index was 34.8.
- Time sets of data about life expectancy and health are more readily available than that required for calculating Gini indices.
- Because of this they are frequently used in monitoring the impacts of development aid, particularly among the poor.
- In the case of Botswana, however, such indicators need to be treated with caution.
Skills focus: Gini coefficient or index
- The Gini index is a statistical measure that can be used to assess the extent to which the distribution of income among individuals or households within an economy deviates from a perfectly equal distribution.
- A Lorenz curve plots the cumulative percentages of total income received against the cumulative number of recipients, starting with the poorest individual or household.
- The Gini index measures the area between the Lorenz curve and a hypothetical line of absolute equality.
- This is expressed as a percentage of the maximum area under the line.
- Thus, a Gini index of 0 represents perfect equality while an index of 100 implies perfect inequality.
- Use of the Gini coefficient is limited by the lack of income data for those countries in which we are particularly interested, i.e. the least developed countries receiving development aid.
Emergency aid:
Rapid assistance given by organisations or governments to people in immediate distress following natural or man-made disasters.
The aim is to relieve suffering and the aid includes such things as food and water, temporary housing and medical help.
Ebola:
A highly contagious and fatal disease spread through contact with body fluids infected by a filovirus. Its symptoms are fever and severe internal bleeding.
The host species of the virus has not been confirmed but fruit bats and primates have been implicated.
The unusual case of Botswana:
By African standards, Botswana is a beacon of hope. It is:
relatively prosperous
politically stable
fairly free of corruption
reasonably respectful of human rights.
But Table 13.2 (page 223) clearly shows a very uneven distribution of income - a wide gap between rich and poor.
Aid and development in Botswana
- Botswana is a sparsely populated, arid and landlocked country with large areas of wilderness.
- At independence in 1966, it was one of the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita income of just US$70 a year.
- In the first few years of independence about 60 per cent of government expenditure came from international aid.
- Agriculture (mostly cattle farming for beef production) accounted for 40 per cent of GDP.
- Since 1966, however, Botswana has maintained one of the world’s highest economic growth rates.
- Through fiscal discipline and sound government, Botswana has transformed itself into a middle-income country with a per capita income of around US$7500.
- The exploitation of one resource - diamonds - has underlain most of this remarkable economic development.
- Botswana is the world’s largest producer of diamonds (Figure 13.5).
- Diamonds account for a third of GDP and about three-quarters of its exports (by value).
- Upmarket tourism, financial services, subsistence farming and cattle rearing are other significant sectors of the economy.
- An expected levelling off in diamond production within the next 20 years overshadows the country’s long-term prospects.
- A comparison of Botswana’s HDI with those of other African countries of similar size speaks for itself (Figure 13.6).
- It would be even more impressive were it not for a low scoring on life expectancy.
- Despite its economic success, it might seem strange that Botswana still receives overseas aid.
- In financial terms this accounts for only three per cent of GDP, and much of it is to do with Botswana’s number one health problem: HIV/AIDS.
Health in Botswana
The prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Botswana is the second highest in the world and threatens the country’s impressive economic gains.
The UN estimates more than one in three adults in Botswana is currently infected with HIV or has developed AIDS.
The disease has orphaned many thousands of children and has dramatically cut life expectancy.
However, with overseas aid, Botswana now has in place one of the most advanced treatment programmes.
Thanks to the economic growth, the government can afford to make anti-retroviral drugs readily available.
Human rights:
Botswana has the reputation of speaking out against human rights abuses in Africa. Often it is the only regional voice to do so. However, not everything in its own backyard is rosy. For example:
The same political party has been in power for over 40 years. State control of the media makes it difficult for opposition parties to campaign in elections on an equal footing.
Botswana retains the death penalty, which it exercises in cases of murder, treason and assassination.
It continues to criminalise homosexuality and discriminate against it in the workforce.
The government is accused of dispossessing the indigenous Bushmen from their lands and traditional water supplies in the Kalahari Desert, mainly because of the vast diamond fields, but also in order to create large game reserves for the benefit of tourists.
Expressions of cultural diversity are not encouraged.
- As with so many countries, Botswana’s record on human rights has its blemishes.
- But at least the country does have a stable, fairly democratic government that has invested some of the diamond profits in public goods and infrastructure.
Superpower objectives:
Superpowers are defined by great economic wealth, military strength, reliable access to resources and a dominant ideology
But no superpower can afford to rest on its laurels.
It needs to be constantly scheming to reinforce or enhance its global status.
More specifically, a superpower needs to be constantly securing:
strategic locations
future supplies of resources (food, energy, minerals and water)
alliances (economic, political and military) with other countries
technological advances
a global sphere of influence.
Aid can be used to
- pave the way to achieving most of these objectives.
- Aid can open doors and can create a sort of halo effect that donor countries are able to exploit for their own ends.
- Aid is rarely offered without strings attached.
- In short, any superpower that neglects to extend aid to less-developed countries does so at its peril.
- The USA has done much to create the image of a magnanimous and benevolent power - a sort of philanthropic fatherly figure providing support to all those in need.
- But most can see through that image and spot its real motives, namely to stay a superpower and outmanoeuvre its rivals.
- But what about one of those emerging superpower rivals, China?
- The interesting thing is that, unlike the USA, China does not seem to have felt the need to set up any sort of larger military alliance.
- We can only speculate about the reasons.
- Is it simply because China is such a giant of a country?
Costs of military interventions
It makes for sober reading, especially when the political outcomes are considered along with the immense human costs.
The outcomes have mainly been negative.
It needs to be stressed that accurate data about civilian deaths and displacement are simply not available
. But there are best estimates made by neutral IGOs and NGOs.
If anything, these estimates are thought to err on the side of understatement.
military intervention outcome examples
Syrian suffering
The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated in 2014 that 10.8 million of Syria’s 22 million population had either been killed or displaced from their homes by the conflict.
Millions were in need of humanitarian assistance.
The UN has predicted that by the end of 201.6 there could be as many as 4.3 million Syrian refugees living outside the country.
The responsibility for most of this huge human cost - deaths, internal displacements and refugees - has to be laid at the door of President Assad and his determination to hold on to power.
Most of this human cost is the outcome of armed Arab fighting armed Arab, with little or no heed paid to innocent civilians who happen to be in between.
To add to the complexity of diverse rebel groups struggling to overthrow President Assad’s regime, the scenario has become even more complicated by:
Russia’s intervention in support of the Assad regime and against the rebel groups
the USA and its allies mounting air strikes aimed first at degrading IS and then dislodging Assad’s regime.
It is certain that all three ‘complications’ will add to the civilian death toll, cause more internal displacement of Syrians and persuade still more to become refugees and seek asylum, not so much in neighbouring Arab states but rather in Europe.
Such an escape involves a truly hazardous journey that has already claimed the lives of thousands as they have tried to cross the Aegean to reach the sanctuary of Greece.
It is significant that few Syrians are seeking asylum in Russia.
The Arab Winter
The Arab Spring of 2011 was a time of great euphoria as seemingly spontaneous public uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt overthrew their corrupt leaders and undemocratic governments.
Western governments were not directly involved and simply applauded from the sidelines.
Sadly, in the wake of the Spring has come the Arab Winter. Parts of North Africa are now beginning to be plagued by Islamist terrorists, particularly those related to IS (Figure 13.9).
The sad truth is that the removal of autocratic leaders and regimes with little respect for human rights did lead to some short-term gains, but it also created political destabilisation, civil wars and the appearance of regimes with even worse human rights records.
Underlying some of this unrest is the deep-rooted animosity between Shia and Sunni Muslims.
How to neutralise this animosity is the challenge. Is it a challenge just for the Arabs or for the whole global community? Some might ask where the UN is in all of this? Should it be taking more of a lead?
The sad fact is that if we look at the military interventions of the last 25 years, the successes have been few and far between.
Some would argue that the positive effects of mitigating potential mass-killings and genocide do not outweigh the long-term negative effects of destabilising the Middle East and North Africa.
Perhaps this is because the military interventions have not been long enough to achieve reconciliation between warring groups and the reconstruction of countries that have been badly damaged, both physically and politically.
The record of non-military interventions
Brought into focus here are the interventions by the UN under the heading of peacekeeping.
According to the UN: ‘Peacekeeping has proven to be one of the most effective tools available to the UN to assist host countries navigate the difficult path from conflict to peace.’
