Aid volumes rise, but UN targets are missed again

April 20th, 2010

Volumes of aid donated by the rich countries to the poor grew in 2009 according to an OECD report published last week and donors are expected to meet their own aid targets in 2010, but are still falling well short of targets set by the UN.

OECD figures show that the total net official development assistance (ODA) from the donors in the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) rose 0.7% in real terms, but the rise was 6.8% once debt relief, a volatile item, is excluded.  OECD Secretary General, Angel Gurría, urged donors to keep the momentum going in future years saying, “This is a vital investment with big returns for the world as a whole”.

Of course, there is considerable doubt over whether this is really as good a thing as one might think.  Sub-Saharan Africa has been getting poorer for the past 30 years despite the injection of billions of dollars of aid – not all of which has ended up benefiting the poor, and plenty of which has benefited the bank accounts of the powerful.

According to the official release, the DAC Chair, Eckhard Deutscher, pointed out that a clear majority of DAC members are meeting their aid commitments even in the face of the economic crisis.  But even though there has been an increase in ODA to Africa, Deutscher pointed out that this fell well short of the Gleneagles target of a $25bn increase by 2010.

The numbers involved are huge – $119.6bn of ODA in 2009, representing 0.31% of DAC members’ combined gross national income (GNI).  This, though, is less than half the UN target of 0.7% of GNI.

In 2009, the largest donors by volume were the USA, France, Germany, the UK and Japan.  Just five countries exceeded the UN target of 0.7% of GNI: Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

The single largest donor was the US, with $29.7bn, but this represented only 0.2% of GNI.

In the UK, where a hard-fought General Election is in progress, all three of the main political parties have pledged to enshrine in law a commitment to provide foreign aid equal to 0.7% of GNI each year from 2013.

The OECD figures show the UK was the fourth largest international donor in 2009, giving $11.5bn in ODA in 2009, equivalent to 0.52 percent of its GNI.  That measure of UK aid has doubled under the Labour government, which has been in power since 1997.

But the key element missing from the OECD run-down of quantities of money given is precisely how this generosity was actually deployed on the ground:  how much of it went into helping the poorest of the poor; how much into job creation; how much into buying arms or shoring up dictators’ bank account?

Now that would be interesting information.

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