Archive for the ‘aid industry’ Category

Are Haiti-donations hurting fundraising for other project?

Thursday, February 4th, 2010

In his article about aid to Haiti, Alexander Glück predicted that “Initiatives that aren’t engaged in Haiti will see a slump.” We have been discussing this question as well on our team, and analysing the impact at betterplace.org.

More donations for Haiti means more donations for other projects
What we’ve seen is actually that the opposite prognosis is the case! Compared to previous months, the numbers between the 15th and 26th of January 2010 show very clearly that many people who have donated to aid in Haiti have at the same time decided to donate to other projects at betterplace.org. Once they’re on our platform in the mood to help, they browse through other projects that may not have anything to do with emergency aid and click on the Donate button!

Apparently, engagement is not just a zero-sum-game. And that makes us happy!

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Five Prognoses on Aid to Haiti – by Alexander Glück

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Following the catastrophe in Haiti, many donations have been made over betterplace.org for organisations that work with emergency aid, from Care International by way of the German Red Cross to the Alliance Action German Aid. Our guest blogger Alexander Glück takes a critical look at this topic. Of course, probably not everyone on the betterplace team shares his five theses, but we find it important to take a look at this particular perspective on emergency aid and we are excited to hear your responses as well:

The moment one has written a critical book about the donation market, the next moment next large donation campaigns are confirming the social giving mechanics that I have described in “The Marketed Responsibility” (Essen: Stiftung & Sponsoring, 2009). If the claims in that book hold true, then one will also have to allow the following prognoses regarding coming developments:

1. There will be new records in giving. But that won’t initially provide emergency relief.

The media tells daily of the overwhelming donation response that has surpassed all expectations, while simultaneously flashing on the screen the donation account numbers, together with strong visual images of suffering. Public heads such as Anne Will, Thomas Gottschalk and — as a columnist for the Bild newspaper — Angela Merkel, apply pressure to the already-existing call for ever-more donations — donations with as few strings attached as possible so as to ensure the most efficient application.

The problems with earthquake areas, however, are more logistical and technical in nature, as the needed resources are already in large part available. The media’s suggestions notwithstanding, a financial payment of any amount does not save a single child buried under the rubble.

2. Haiti is facing a profound structural change

The funds acquired won’t finance immediate aid, but will rather go toward initiatives for long-term reconstruction projects. Which is all well and good, except that it will never be discussed. Distribution and allocation conflicts will be the result, and without a functioning structure, unjust allocations and benefits will inevitably occur. Add to this the substantial roll of Haiti’s oligarchy, which before the catastrophe lived at the expense of the majority population, and which will in the future further attempt to allocate the funds according to such a structure. The coming changes can breakdown old structures of exploitations in order to build new ones in its place.

3. Initiatives not engaged in Haiti will see a slump

Whoever is donating to Haiti is not going to donate to another initiative. Donations for long-term aid in Haiti are now so important that, in the in the current donation frenzy, they threaten to overshadow many other equally-urgent projects; such projects will consequently see a clear decline in giving toward their causes, since after giving generously to Haiti, many donors won’t make the decision to give toward yet another project.

4. Incompetent initiatives will propagate the Haiti issue

We saw it during the Tsunami catastrophe of 2004. Fundraisers and advertising agencies crowded in to adopt the cause in order to increase their own donation profits. This will happen again, though most of these initiatives are incompetently prepared to engage this realm of aid, therefore eventually risking a considerable loss of prestige to their organisations.

5. Haiti will come more firmly under U.S. control

For the time being, the United States’ military presence in Haiti is ensuring the necessary structures to quickly and effectively distribute needed relief. The almost invasion-like arrival of the U.S. soldiers in Haiti will in all probability last for two decades and after awhile, won’t have anything to do anymore with aid to the earthquake victims.

Alexander Glück www.der-spendenkomplex.de.tt

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What happened in 2009? What will happen in 2010? Part 1

Monday, January 11th, 2010

At the end of 2009 we published a 4-part review of the past year, combined with a look ahead to things coming to betterplace.org and within the social sector in 2010. Thanks to Becky in the betterplace team, we now have a translation:

Donations decreased only slightly despite the crisis
Initially there was much speculation in 2009 as to how largely the economic crisis would affect donor activity. In contrast to the situation in the USA, where in 2009 the average donation received was only half of what it was in the previous year, and almost all nonprofits reported grave financial losses, the financial crisis in Germany had (at least in the first half of 2009) a much less negative impact on the volume of donations overall. Donation incomes were indeed slightly decreased – the executive committee of the German Spendenrat figured 5% fewer donations related to anxiety over job loss and lower returns on investments by retired persons.  The decrease in donations seems mainly to be the result of untypically high incomes due to natural catastrophes in 2008 in Birma and China, Pakistan and India, but also because organisations in 2009 sent fewer (expensive) donation request letters and received correspondingly fewer earnings.

Donors preferred smaller organisations
More Germans preferred to donate to smaller non-profit organisations this year rather than to the “usual suspects.”  This trend was documented by an experiment at the Center for European Economic Research (Zentrum für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung – ZEW) in Mannheim. The test involved 223 participants between the ages of 18-75 chosen to represent the German population. In the lab, participants made actual decisions about donating (in the mostly standard survey, test participants only answered hypothetical questions rather than donating money themselves).

In 73% of the cases, small organisations were preferred to large ones (small was defined as organisations earning between 40.000 and 300.000€ per year). Only 27% of participants selected larger Institutions. Behind these results is a crisis of trust: many donors are asking themselves whether their donations to large organisations disappear in the cloud of administrative and consultant honorarium expenses rather than in the work of directly eliminating social injustices. In accordance with the Spendenrat, donors today demand more clarity and insight directly into the projects and balances. (Now, we should stress that transparency in smaller organisations in Germany is not per se better than that in larger organisations, and that administrative costs are necessary to further good work. This is rather a question of the relativity and quality of the achieved work).

The trend toward smaller nonprofits coincides with a general trend in other branches. Music and bookstores have likewise experienced the replacement of the mass market by a swarm of digitalised niche markets.

Online bookseller Amazon’s many sales of poorly circulated niche books—scientific essays, poetry collections, memoirs—far outweighs their sale revenues from the few annual bestsellers.  For the social sector, this implies that the small sums that you or I donate to a local association in Brandenburg or to a social project in Mozambique have a more significant impact than the funds that are given to large, well-known aid organisations.

In 2010 the “long tail” of aid will become even more meaningful
More and more users will visit platforms like betterplace.org, global giving or Help India with the aim to find relevant organisations to match their interests. Nowadays platforms give small and middle-sized organisations more visibility than previously. But even large aid organisations can gain committed donors by clearly depicting their work and transparently accounting for their use of funds.

At the same time, local projects will continue to gain increased significance, as was already shown in 2009. In this time of crisis, people are working much more on-site: at the source of the need and where, if in doubt, donors can drop by to check on a project’s work and to be convinced of its value.

In Part II of our year review, we will look at the changes that digital technologies have in the social sector, and at the development of online fundraising in Germany.

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Eradicate Poverty by Focussing on Girls and Women

Saturday, October 17th, 2009

Today marks the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. I am currently in Indonesia, a country which – despite its many natural and cutural riches and an affluent upper- and middleclas – has nearly half its population living under the poverty line on less than $2 a day. Even though the government has been allocating increasing funds to poverty eradication (from Rp 41 trillion ($4.3 billions) in 2006 to Rp 66.2 trillion this year, the results have been disappointing with no significant improvements to be observed and no chance of meeting the MDG (Millenium Development Goals) by 2015.

The Jakarta Post quotes Trihardi Saptoadi, the director of World Vision Indonesia:

the governments programs to eradicate poverty have either missed their targets or have been ineffective.

The fact that more money spend doesn’t mean that programs and policies be more effective, is one voiced by many critics of the conventional aid regime.

Half The Sky
Fortunately in recent years we have seen more rigorous and empirically based studies about the workings and failures of aid programs. Many of these are mentioned in Half The Sky, the new book by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

In the words of the authors:

Half the Sky lays out an agenda for the world’s women and three major abuses: sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence including honor killings and mass rape; maternal mortality, which needlessly claims one woman a minute. We know there are many worthy causes competing for attention in the world. We focus on this one because this kind of oppression feels transcendent – and so does the opportunity. Outsiders can truly make a difference.

So let us be clear up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women’s power as economic catalysts.

The Girl Effect
It’s a read I highly recommend, a compelling mix of highly emotional individual life stories, both of female suffering and female agency, academic analysis and concrete policy recommandations.

One of Kristofs and WuDunns main claims is that it makes sense for anti-poverty programs to focus on girls and women. It is an impolitic secret of global poverty, they write that:

some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes, but also by unwise spending – by men. It is not uncommon to stumble across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a 5$ mosquito bed net and than find the child’s father at a bar, where he spends $5 each week. Several studies suggest that when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratifycation and more for education and starting small businesses. …“

MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo found out that the worlds poorest families typically spend approx. 10 times as much (an average of 20% of their income) on a combination of alcohol, prostitutes, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children.

… if poor people spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor children. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries.

One of the simplest solutions to end poverty would thus be to reallocate spending. This is evidenced in many studies: for example, Esther Duflo looked at the capital allocation of men and women in Ivory Coast. Here, men crow coffee, cocao and pineapple, whereas women grow plaintains, bananas, coconuts and vegetables. Some years the „men’s crops“ have good harvests, in others it is the women who prosper. When the men’s crops flourish, the household spends more money on alcohol and tobacco. When the women have the money, the household spends more money on food, particularly beef. Other studies suggest that women are more likely to invest in education and small businesses. Duflo: „When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves.“

Micro-lending and lobbying for legal change
The aid industry can do a whole lot of things to empower women economically, for example rolling out micro-landing programs targeting women. But often the change has to be on a higher level, as in the many countries where women still are not allowed to own land or inherit from their husbands (instead the inheritance usually goes to the brother of the deceased). Here aid-giving Western governments can tie money to legal reform: thus when the small South African kingdom of Lesotho applied for Millenium Challenge Money, the US pushed Lesotho to change a law according to which women were not allowed to buy land or borrow money without a husbands permission. In its eagerness to get the funding it did so.

One thing I find very compelling about Half The Sky is that Kristof and WuDunn don’t make the fight against poverty sound easy. Instead they present it as a hard road, full of trial and error, often working in a highly irrational way and prone to many unforeseeable turns. This realism combined with a forcefull belief that we can make a difference in the lives of the poor and that one of the most promising ways is by focussing on girls and women, seems to me the right approach.

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betterplace.org and What Would Google Do?

Sunday, July 26th, 2009

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One book which gets handed down from one family member to the other during our holiday in France is Jeff Jarvis’ What Would Google Do? Even our 14 year old son Vico is reading it right now.

Jarvis owns BuzzMachine.com, one of the most popular blogs about the Internet and new media, teaches journalism at New Yorks City University and writes the new media column for the Guardian. What Would Google Do? identifies some of the major principles behind the success of google – the fastest growing company in history. In chapters with titles such as Give the People Control and We Will Use it, Do What You Do Best and Link to the Rest or Free is a Business Model Jarvis illuminates the new rules guiding our current Internet-driven economy.

It’s an inspiring read, especially as so much of it is reflected in our work with betterplace. We understand the plattform as a disruptive technological answer to some of the main challenges facing the non-profit sector: 

- The sector is highly intransparent. Or do you know what is happing to the money you have donated?

- The cost of financing social causes and innovation are high: the cost of conventional fundraising can absorb up to 50% of donations raised.

- there is a huge lack of accountability (especially with regards to beneficiaries), insufficient stakeholder feedback and – resulting from this – poor impact measurement. Or do you know whether a donation to World Vision benefits more people than one to the Choki Traditional Art School?

The disruptive potential of betterplace

At betterplace we offer answers to these challenges:

Transparency:
Aid organisations and social initiatives posting projects are required to specify their projects, breaking down the „needs“ needed for their realisation. Project managers are asked to report about the project progress in their project blog, in writing and posting photos and videos. 

Cost free fundraising:
The use of betterplace is free and 100% of all donations received through the plattform are transfered to the project.

Quality control through the Web of Trust:
Traditional trust mechanisms, such as the brand of an organisation or its charitable status in Germany, are combined with network-trust: i.e. we give a multitude of project-stakeholders the possibility to say what they know about the project and the people running it. Thus beneficiaries, travellers and neighbours (who have visistedt he project), employees of the organisation etc. can all have a voice. Thus a much more realistic image of the project is available, enabling donors to make an informed choice.

Being disruptive implies that traditional processes and systems are broken apart and value chains shortened, making them more transparent and effective. Our co-founder Jörg Rheinboldt, who was one of the founders of Alando (which was in turn bought by Ebay) and served many years as CEO of Ebay Germany, knows from experience that this is not to everybodys liking. But those who adapt early to the principles and rules of the new order will be the ones to profit.

To be continued

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Posted in Stephan Breidenbach, aid industry, betterplace.org, development 2.0., joana breidenbach, web of trust | No Comments »

The magic of transparency

Sunday, June 7th, 2009

Since the beginning of this year, as we started actively approaching aid organizations to present their work on betterplace, I have had many conversations with fundraisers and project managers. In these discussions I am trying to find out how to improve the  interface between betterplace.org and organisations of differend sizes, from small grassroots initiatives to large, international aid organisations. We obviously want many organisations to use the plattform, as we offer our services free of cost and enable organisations to lower their fundraising costs. Lower fundraising costs means more money can go to where donors want it to go: to the project.

Projects and needs – an illusionary world?

On betterplace.org donors support specific projects, broken down into even smaller needs. Project managers are asked to keep supporters up to date about the progress of the project and inform them once the financed need has been realized.

This procedure is not without its critics. Organisations, especially large ones, are used to work with global budgets, which they allocate according to their internal dynamics. They tell me: „This is not how we work. The donations we collect in Germany are handed over to our international headquarters and they forward them to the projects. We only hear once a year about what has been done with them in the field.“ Others remark that their budgets  are so huge that no way can they give feedback about the realisation of specific needs.

After these discussions I am sometimes asking myself, whether our demand for greater transparency is so much at odds with the workings of large organisations, that we are in danger of creating an illusionary world, whereby organisations post a project in „the betterplace-way“, but can’t honestly deliver what we are asking them to do.

For many (I would say most) organisations and initiatives on betterplace.org our approach is no doubt working fine. A grassroots initiative sich as Cecil Kids Center in Mombasa doesn’t have any funding sources outside of betterplace. The project volume iss mall and tasks such as the building of 2 latrines ort he renovation of a classroom can be broken down nicely. Once the donations have come together, the work can start and a few weeks later, donors receive a message in the form of a blogpost by the project manager, accompanied with photos, that the project has been finished.

Large NGOs on the other hand have many different sources of funding. The fundraisers who present the organisations projects are located far from the field and might themselves get only irregular and indirect information about the progress of the project.

Is betterplace only suitable for small grassroots initiatives?

Is the betterplace way for these latter organisations only a marketing tool, used to get donors to open their pockets, as donors prefer to contribute to specific tasks and needs rather than to large global budgets?

I believe, not. Even a huge social project has a budget and knows what will be needed for its realisation. And there is no reason why a huge transnational NGO shouldn’t be able to inform its donors in word and image, what has been accomplished with their help. (and some large organisations used betterplace wonderfully in this way).

Let’s take a random project on betterplace, A winter proof house for Tadzhikistan (btw, a project I find really worthy of our support).

Of course it would be wrong for donors to assume that once someone has donated 70 Euro for a door, the organisation will go out and use this very money to buy a door. But what I can expect as a donor is that a door will be bought as part of the project realization and that the organisation will sent me proof of this purchase by posting a picture of the houses built.

The difference donors make, should be made visible

That’s what ist all about: people who contribute to a project with money, time, expertise or donations in kind, have a right to know what happens with their money. They have a right to see the difference they help to make. Of course, this is not always possible. A number of poverty alleviation measures and programmes don’t have quick and visible results, their impact can only be measured over a longer period of time. How do you want to measure improved self-esteem? But in many cases visible proof is possible. When I have contributed to the building of a classroom, that classroom can be documented and the success of the project measured. 

Too many well-intentioned aid projects fail. Last month, on my trip through Usbekistan, I heard about a number of large projects, financed in the 1990s by the EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) which simply evaporated, as the money went into the deep pockets of corrupt politicians and businesspeople.

Transparency and communication fight corruption

Transparency openes up the blackbox „aid“ and fights corruption. Let’s take the case of an organisation in Cambodia which lists on betterplace what will be needed for the construction of a new internet cafe. They break down the project into cement, stones, doors, windows, electric systems, laptops etc.. Now other people on the plattform, with intimate knowledge of the local, cambodian construction scene, can come in and comment on the prices beeing listed and disclose if they are „real“ or include major kickbacks.

Transparency is more often than not a question of communication. Nobody wants projects managers to slavishly stick to once posted needs, which turn out to be counterproductive. The core issue is how you communicate what is happening on the ground.

One more example: Marcus Vetter, project manager from Cinema Jenin, recently told me that he didn’t use the donations received via betterplace for the „renovation of the 1st dozen of cinema chairs“ for the renovation of 12 chairs. This would have been impracticle and expensive. Instead he uses the first funds received to buy the material needed for all 500 chairs. The rest of the work will be done once the money has come together.

I believe the majority of donors doesn’t care in which sequence the work is being done. What matters is whether the chairs will be renovated by the time the cinema opens ist doors.

 

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Dead Aid

Monday, May 4th, 2009

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„In the past fifty years, over US$ 1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. … but has (this) made African people better off? No, in fact …the recipients of this aid are worse off; much worse off. Aid has helped make the poor poorer, and growth slower.“

This is the verdict of Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian-born, Harvard- and Oxford-trained economist, who worked at the World Bank and was until recently Global Economist and Strategist at Goldman Sachs. Moyo has written Dead Aid, a devastating critique of the aid ideology and industry, which has been in place ever since the meeting in Bretton Woods (which saw the creation of the World Bank and the IMF) and Truman’s inaugural address in 1949 (in which he called upon the industrialized nations to share their scientific and economic advances with the „underdeveloped“ world).

For readers familiar with the history of development aid, Moyo doesn’t offer new insights, but sums them up nicely: she recounts the chain of ideologies following one another – from the big infrastructural policies of the 1960s and 70s (the dams, the green revolution) to the structural adjustment doctrines of the 1980s. Most of them with negative consequences for the countries in which they were implemented (a few hints will have to do: badly mismanaged resettlement, decreased biodiversity, dramatic cutting back of social systems, uneven trade regulations, huge debts).

It is a depressing read: Despite the millions flowing into the continent, Africas economic growth declined continuously, poverty levels rose and the level of corruption reached unbelievable heights. While asking President Reagan for debt relief, Zaire’s Mobutu leased Concorde to fly his daughter to her wedding in the Ivory coast.

Moyo is equally critical of the rise of glamour aid in the 2000s –

„the army of moral campaigners – the pop stars, the movie stars, new philanthropists… to carve out niches for themselves, as they took on the fight for more, not less, aid to be sent to Africa. … One disastrous consequence of this has been that honest, critical and serious dialogue and debate on the merits and demerits of aid have been atrophied. As one critic of the aid model remarked, „my voice can’t compete with an electric guitar“.

Aid is easy money
The main problem with aid is that it is easy money: it comes without conditions and accountability: a Word Bank study found that as much as 85% of aid flows were used for purposes other than that for which they were initially intended. Aid is like oil, enabling powerful elites to embezzle public revenues. Yet this diversion doesn’t have any consequences – the same countries who badly misuse funds, end up receiving even more.

Many studies point to the fact that aid increases corruption and dependency, prevents the emergence of trustworthy legal and civic institutions, thus making domestic and foreign investment in poor countries unattractive. Because aid flows are viewed as permanent income, policymakers in African countries have no incentive to look for other, better ways of financing their countries development.

Yet regardless of these findings, the aid industry dishes out more and more aid. Moyo, rightly, I believe, explains this with the internal dynamics of the aid institutions – The livelihood of approx. 500.000 people employed by aid organizations depends on lending. And for most development organizations, successful lending is measured by the size of the donor’s lending portfolio, and not by how much of the aid is actually used for its intended purpose. As shocking as it is, outcomes don’t seem to matter.

Cut of Aid permanently
What is special about Moyo’s book is not so much her critical take on aid – others such as Paul Collier and William Easterly have voiced the same arguments. What I liked about her book is that it offers a detailed alternative: cut off aid completely over the course of 5 years and develop alternative financial sources to finance the development agenda of African countries. 

Governments could find money for development through financial markets, both international and domestic, by issuing bonds.

Historically, the governments of those countries that have successfully developed funded investment by recourse to international markets. In order to borrow, they needed decent credit ratings; to get the ratings, they had to be transparent and prudent. The discipline of transparency and prudence were as important as the money in promoting development. Some of the stronger African governments have at last started down this road. She also sees huge scope for innovations in micro-finance, such as the group borrowing pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Moyo also advocades fairer trade rules for African countries, citing that Africa loses around US$ 500 billion each year because of restrictive (mainly Western) trade embargoes (largely in the form of subsidies by Western governments to Western farmers).

In a chapter „The Chinese are our friends“, Moyo is also optimistic about the impact the Chinese are having on Africa, writing that no country has made as big an impact in the economic and social fabric of Africa as China has since the turn of the millennium. (As of mid-2007, China’s FDI to Africa was US$ 100 billion.).

As Paul Collier in a review of Dead Aid, points out, Moyo is probably too optimistic, especially in view of the current financial climate. Nevertheless, I recommend the book as a valuable overview of why aid has failed and what could come to replace it to finance Africas development.

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"We are here" – The Skoll World Forum 2008 in Oxford

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

The start of Skoll World Forum 2008 has been as unpredictable and refreshing as the (much discussed) weather in Oxford.

The rain was drizzling down on the front door steps of the Said Business School as newly arrived delegates gathered to complete their registration and begin the first of a 3 day forum on Social Entrepreneurship. The drizzle continued as delegates were seen mingling, shaking hands, chatting in gentle murmurs, and sipping cups of organic tea in the lobby. A sense of anticipation simmered through the crowd as more and more people arrived, together with the occasional shaft of sunshine the sound of enthusiastic voices of friends and acquaintances greeting one another broke through the crowd.

The theme of this years Skoll Forum is culture. Asking the question: if social entrepreneurship is truly about changing the world, then what are the cultural and contextual barriers that social entrepreneurs need to overcome to create sustainable change in the areas where they work?

Amongst the speakers at the opening plenary, was an impressive panel of women, each telling their story about how they have had to having to overcome challenging cultural barriers to be successful, and thereby having a profound global impact.
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Jody Williams spoke of communication being the key to success. That everyone needs the same information to be empowered.

Karen Tse, Founder and CEO of Bridges of Justice told a story of warriors before a battle to illustrate what was needed to overcome cultural barriers. The warriors were told that were 2 things that must be remembered throughout if they were to be successful: compassion and interconnectedness. Both of which remain important in our growing global village.

As we left the prestigious Sheldonian Theatre the rain thundered down – as if in confirmation of Jeff Skoll’s opening remarks of the forum “We are here”.
We are here, as social entrepreneurs, to cross cultural barriers and make a significant and lasting impact on the discourse of social change and development.

The Skoll World Forum can be followed online.

Line Hadsbjerg

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They come in the name of helping

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Last night I saw “They come in the name of helping”, a film (coming to me via Global Giving. The film originally appeared in Peter Deitzs blog about micro-philanthropy, which features individuals, organisations and platforms using Web 2.0 applications to enable micro-donations and social change) by 22 year old Political Science student Peter Brock. Shot in Sierra Leone, the second poorest country in the world, it portrays young students voicing their views about development aid.

It took quite some time to load, but the authentic voices are worth the wait.

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Tales from Mali

Friday, March 7th, 2008

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One of the people behind The Mali Initiative, Jürgen Nagler describes in an interesting blogpost some of his recent experiences with the aid system in Mali. In January my family and I had the chance to visit their pilot school in Bamako and are happy to support their work on betterplace. Jürgens tales from the fourth-poorest nation echo William Easterly’s theses about the failure of the Western aid system.  

There is, for example, a project supported by the World Bank, which diverts water from Kalabancoro (the suburb of Bamako, in which the school we visited is located) to other more central suburbs: now the latter have water, but Kalabancoro is drying out and its inhabitants need to bring water in containers from a distant well.  

Money is flowing from the large Western aid organisations to large Southern governments – only to disappear in the Bermuda triangle between ministers, regions and communes without ever trickling down to the intended recipients – the poor.  

Corruption is everywhere. On our trip we witnessed many times how taxi drivers stop for policemen and at road check points only to be allowed to continue with their trip after handing over a few well-used CFA notes. In an article in the German weekly DIE ZEIT, a village elder bitterly complains to the journalist:

If we had our way, we would kill these civil servants! They feed on our blood! The foreign donors should give the money to us directly, not to the government and not to the bureaucracies. Whatever they give them, they might as well not give at all. The bureaucrats only want to develop themselves, not the country.   

Aid disappears, but because donors and recipients thrive on the existing system and manage to support their own interests, they have little reason to reform it. Using manipulated statistics, they manage to hide many obvious defaults:

Thus when Nagler spoke to mayors and teachers in the rural communities where the Initiative plans to establish new class rooms, he was told that 99% of all primary students pass the test for secondary school. Nagler and his collegues were impressed – until they found out that only 5% of these students spoke French. Yet French is the language of instruction at secondary schools and the test had been rigged in order to satisfy the expectations of aid agencies and their backers.

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