Britain has a foreign aid office called DFiD, or the Dept. for International Development. It is like USAID in the US. Both agencies provide "foreign aid" to developing countries like Iraq and Afghanistan.
The two UK articles below (at the link) quote a UK "National Audit Office" report that says the government through DFiD is wasting "millions of pounds" (one british pound is about $2) on overseas aid projects. We have posted earlier that USAID kinda has the same problem. They don't implement strong enough controls to prevent corruption from siphoning off funds, and USAID just "rescopes" a job going bad to build fewer projects for the same amount of money, and doesn't think that is a problem.
When I was in Iraq, however, I was impressed with the DFiD people. They seemed much more businesslike and control oriented than the former PeaceCorps people running USAID.
Favorite Quotes:
vj
Corruption and mismanagement blighting overseas aid
According to the National Audit Office, the Department for International Development is suffering from "limited experience" in insecure countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
The government's spending watchdog cited the specific example of a £20 million aid programme in Iraq that was brought down by local officials grossly over-billing the project's number of work days.
The failure has lead to accusations that DfID needed to "learn new skills and up its game".
"Today's report makes clear that DfID needs urgently to improve its performance in conflict zones like Iraq and Afghanistan," said shadow international development secretary Andrew Mitchell.
"I hope [international development secretary] Douglas Alexander will look carefully at this report," Mr Mitchell continued.
"We need action to improve DfID's performance in backing up the British military effort to win the battle for hearts and minds."
In its report, the NAO said that only half of the government's projects achieve their aims, with a quarter suffering from fraud or financial problems.
It also warned that staff's lives were being put at risk due to inadequate security provisions, despite £250,000 being spent on individual workers based in Afghanistan.
"DfID staff work hard – often in difficult and dangerous situations – to deliver real benefits to some of the world’s most vulnerable people," noted NAO head Tim Burr.
"DfID could still make better use of its teams' growing experience in this field to adapt standard aid practices to meet the challenges presented by insecurity."
A departmental spokesperson told inthenews.co.uk it was reviewing its working practices in insecure environments and fragile states.
"Insecure states are by their nature extremely difficult and sometimes dangerous places for staff to work and conditions vary widely between them," the representative said.
"Lessons from one are not necessarily applicable elsewhere."
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From the Independent in the UK
Afghan aid blunders 'waste millions'
National Audit Office criticises corruption and incompetence
By Kim Sengupta
Thursday, 16 October
2008
The NAO report said the Department for International Development was failing to 'achieve all or most of its objectives' in Afghanistan
Millions of pounds of British aid to poor and war-torn countries has been wasted because of mismanagement and corruption, an official report reveals today.
An investigation by the National Audit Office (NAO) found a series of expensive blunders by the Department For International Development (DFID) in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq have undermined reconstruction efforts. These included:
* DFID-funded wells are running dry in Afghanistan because no geological surveys were carried out before they were built;
* DFID spent £20m on an Afghan counter-narcotic programme over three years during which time opium production continued to rise;
* Poor monitoring by DFID in Congo meant that bed nets given to pregnant women had not been treated with insecticide and, as a result, cases of malaria increased.
Overall, the NAO found that almost a quarter of DFID's billion-pound conflict zone projects suffered from fraud and financial problems. In Iraq, a £20m project became immersed in corruption when local officials massively overbilled the amount of work days. In Afghanistan, it found that the DFID was failing to "achieve all or most of its objectives" in the region while, at the same time, there was "high staff turnover, limited experience and staffing gaps".
The report commends DFID for carrying out a number of worthwhile international projects, but highlights severe shortcomings.
The investigation found that although the Department spent £256,000 per person of the staff it had based in Afghanistan, much of it going on providing security, many employees in the insecure countries considered that their posting was not "healthy and safe". The dissatisfaction was highest among those involved with Nigeria (59 per cent), Afghanistan (45 per cent) and the Congo (40 per cent).
The NAO noted that there appeared to be no mechanism to ensure experienced staff were dispatched to the danger zones. In Afghanistan, 50 per cent of the civil servants had not served overseas before and, of the rest, only 15 per cent had previously worked in an insecure area.
Some of the problems with DFID projects, said the report, were due to a lack of checks made on local partners in projects. "Inadequate assessment of partners left unidentified gaps in the capacity to deliver," the report concludes. "Which in turn has hampered DFID's ability to spend its funds and therefore reduce impact on the ground."
The NAO concluded: "DFID could be better and faster at learning lessons... DFID needs to apply the lessons from practical experience more quickly; for example by assessing and managing security risks and finding new ways to keep track of programmes when site visits are dangerous."
DFID's aid work has come in for criticism in Afghanistan, in particular, from British military commanders who have charged that failure to provide viable reconstruction projects have made it more difficult to win over the population in Helmand.
Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative spokesman on International Development, said: "The report makes clear that DFID needs urgently to improve its performance in conflict zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. It is clear that DFID needs to learn new skills and to up its game. We need action to improve DFID's performance in backing up the British military effort to win the battle for hearts and minds."
The MP Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons' Public Accounts Committee, said: "DFID need to get the right people in the right place with the right skills to work effectively in these countries. It does not help that some feel insufficiently protected."
But Ashraf Ghani, a former finance minister for the Afghan President Hamid Karzai and a renowned development analyst, said problems were being faced by DFID because it had been thrust into an unfamiliar role. "DFID was set up to operate in countries which are at peace and they do their job there very well," he said. "But they have been asked to take on a role in Afghanistan which is new and fraught with problems. Because of the security situation in Helmand they are having to depend on contractors and of course this makes it far more difficult to monitor what is going on."
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