Don Cayo, Vancouver Sun / Published: Thursday, July 17, 2008
The current foreign aid fad is to channel most money through recipient governments rather than the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that actually deliver most services in most poor countries.
This wins the donors (Canada among them) high praise from the heads of those lucky governments who get the cheques. They like this policy a lot.
But the people the money’s supposed to help? No so much.
–snip–
….a key cause of mass poverty is bad governance — incompetent, corrupt, sometimes even vicious. In other words, far fewer places would be poor if their governments could be trusted. So who wants to prop up their leaders with money for them to siphon off from its intended uses?
–snip–
Tom Kessinger, deputy chair of the Aga Khan Development Network, says his agency hasn’t yet been seriously affected by this trend. The AKDN, which is substantially funded by the personal wealth of the Aga Kahn as well as his Ismaili Muslim followers around the world, still also gets support from many donor governments, including Canada.
But Kessinger worries that the trend will inevitably take money away from agencies that have a solid track record for results.
When it comes to results, NGOs are often better positioned than governments, and not only because they don’t feel obligated to deal through recipient governments even when they’re incompetent or corrupt.
In my view, the AKDN, as just one example, deals far more effectively with the need to focus sharply and for the long term than does CIDA, the aid arm of the Canadian government.
The first thing AKDN has done is to commit to development aid rather than — except in the direst emergency — mere stopgap relief, Kessinger told me.
The second is to stay in for the long haul — a crucial strategy if improvements are ever to take root and grow strong enough to stand on their own.
Third, it focuses on a relative handful of countries in just a few parts of the world. Granted, this is a more obvious choice for AKDN than for a donor government.
While the Ismaili agency doesn’t limit its aid to Muslims, it does confine itself to countries where Ismailis have cultural connections and sound knowledge of the social and political landscape.
Ismailimail 