Such a simple question: Should Oxfam spend a couple of hundred pounds a month opening up the swimming pool at its guesthouse in one of the nicer parts of Nairobi? It was posed by Duncan Green, the group’s head of research, on his blog, and provoked a revealing bout of navel-gazing in the aid industry.
The pool was shut, Mr Green disclosed, on the orders of the charity’s head office, which feared a scandal. The post went viral, sparking a far bigger response than Mr Green’s usual musings on poverty. Some comments were satirical, such as the suggestion Oxfam open a golf course for staff in Kenya. Others were superbly sanctimonious, such as the humanitarian worker who wrote: “We all agonise that we are not Gandhi.” One respondent alleged that a major charity recently held a big management meeting at a luxury game lodge in South Africa, where rooms are £150 a night. There was talk of “doing very nicely financially while fighting poverty” and of a “good friend who has become a millionaire from the poverty industry” thanks to the generosity of the Department for International Development (DFID) and the World Bank. This is not the sort of thing mentioned in fund-raising leaflets.
Successive governments, dazzled by celebrity campaigners, have ramped up aid donations and promoted topical causes. These days, Britain even forces aid down the throats of nations that do not want it. The British government gives £280 million a year to India, which distributes foreign aid itself and in a decade will have a bigger economy than ours. The Indians asked to stop taking “peanuts” from the British but, we have learned, DFID insisted it would be too embarrassing to change course.
Mr Green’s blog highlighted the contortions of a thriving industry that would go out of business if it succeeded in its stated aims. Aid workers know they are not saints; privately, they admit the shortcomings of their trade. They accept that billions have been wasted on failed ideas and flawed projects, and acknowledge that huge sums still go missing or are misspent. These concerns find increasingly strong echoes across the developing world. A swelling chorus of economists, politicians and pundits argue that Western aid policies are patronising, destructive and outdated. They say big donations fuel corruption and undermine the accountability of governments, which come to rely on handouts from abroad rather than the support of taxpayers at home.
Consider Somaliland, which broke away from Somalia 21 years ago, and has become not only a haven of good governance but also a case study in how the absence of aid can lead to success. Because Somaliland has struggled to achieve internation-al recognition, it has never received as much international money as its peers. “We were left to rely on our own resources — there could be no complacency,” the country’s energy minister, Hussein Abdi Dualeh, told me when I went there last year. “I’m not a huge believer in foreign aid,” he added. “How many countries have moved ahead and developed with international aid? It is not the formula for development.”
I have just returned from Haiti, a place whose recent history underlines Mr Dualeh’s point. Even before the devastating earthquake two years ago, it was nicknamed “the Republic of NGOs”, because it had more charities per capita than anywhere else on the planet. In the past 50 years, Haiti has received four times more aid, per head of population, than Europe under the Marshall Plan, and average incomes there have fallen by more than a third.
At the other end of the same island is the Dominican Republic. Like Haiti, over those 50 years, it suffered political violence, military invasion and corruption. On the other hand, it received far less aid. Incomes in the Dominican Republic tripled.
In Haiti, since the earthquake, anger has risen. People are asking what happened to the billions donated in emergency relief: fewer than 5,000 new houses have been built and half a million people remain stuck in squalid tent cities. There are stories of charity workers living in £2,500-a-month flats and eating lobster in restaurants. The Prime Minister reckons that 40 per cent of the money went to support the foreigners handing it out.
Meanwhile the aid caravan is moving on to new disasters. As Gaetan Drossart, the searingly honest head of mission for Médicins Sans Frontiéres, told me, the humanitarian business is a business like any other, and emergencies are important to it: “Organisations want to be in front of the cameras in an emergency to attract attention, since this gets the money.” But he fears his organisation is increasingly rare in actually focusing on emergency work, rather than on lucrative long-term development. “This is where you can save lives,” he says. “The big actors are more focused on development. But there is a failure in the development model — we do not know why it is not working.”
In broken countries such as Haiti and Somalia, humanitarian bodies are more important than the state: some African nations receive more than half their income in aid. Charities run schools and health services with minimal accountability or transparency.
Newspapers and broadcasters take pride in their readiness to challenge cant and corruption in government departments, corporations and public bodies. Charities, especially the big global ones, should be treated in the same manner. Bosses holding seminars in safari parks and consultants making millions from poverty should be held to account. Instead, despite growing aid budgets and growing concerns over the efficacy of aid, journalists treat their word as gospel.
When highly paid charity chief executives and aid workers thrust starving children towards cameras to demand money for the latest emergency, they are rarely challenged over their statements, their solutions or their spending records — let alone quizzed over deadly bungles. Increasingly, papers also rely on NGOs to fund foreign stories, which are handed to them on a plate, presented in an uncritical manner and run without any declaration of interest. The charity industry has grown fat on unthinking compassion fuelled by uncritical coverage. Where 40 groups worked in the camps that aided refugees fleeing Pol Pot in the 1980s, more than 1,000 major aid bodies arrive for the typical modern disaster, often causing chaos. Since the 1980s, the number of charities working in Ethiopia has increased 200-fold: the real legacy of Live Aid.
Some charitable organisations are good, some are bad — but none are sacred. Together, they form one of the strongest forces in the modern world. And there is strong evidence that for all their good intentions, their work often backfires. It should be the job of journalists to ask the toughest questions even if they do wear hearts on their sleeves.
The writer is a contributing editor of the Daily Mail
By arrangement with the Spectator