NGO "ANOTHER WAY" (STICHTING BAKENS VERZET), NETHERLANDS, SUSTAINABLE INTEGRATED SELF-FINANCING DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS AND ADVANCED DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGIES

“Time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved.” (C.N. Parkinson, in his satirical work Parkinson’s Law, or the Pursuit of Progress, Riverside Press, Cambridge (Mass.), 1957. (7th printing), Section 3 : High Finance or the Point of Vanishing Interest, p. 11). This is widely known as the Law of Triviality. It fully applies to the main-line development aid industry, where large-scale capital-intensive projects of benefit to multinational corporations and financial institutions have been approved and put into execution with little or no consultation with the people most directly (negatively) affected by them.

It also applies, but paradoxically, to integrated development projects where local populations fully discuss, plan, execute, maintain and pay for their own initiatives, many of which may not involve any formal money costs at all. The projects do not involve any complex issues local populations cannot understand and decide upon. So there are no “points of vanishing interest”.

In his book Lords of Poverty, [McMillan, London 1989. ISBN 0 7493 0503 7], Graham Hancock gave a well-documented description of the development aid of the time.

In the years following publication of the book aid institutions in donor nations claimed to have improved their services and approaches to development aid. They claimed, for example, they no longer applied the principle of tied aid where goods and services of the donor nation are preferentially supplied by the donor country itself.

Nevertheless, the governments of most donor nations now formally and openly promote business opportunity as the driving factor for their development aid activities. This “privatisation” of development aid is strongly contested by sector specialists. On this read the short article by A. Scrivener, We must resist the privatisation of aid, Blog, Left Foot Forward Ltd, London, 13 March, 2013.

Information involving the U.K.’s DFID (Department for International Development) was supplied on 15^th September, 2012, by A.Gilligan, "Poverty barons" who make a fortune from tax-payer funded aid budget ” ( The Telegraph, The Telegraph Media Group, London, 15^th September, 2012).

The current position of the United States on “aid” is crystal clear :

“Foreign assistance is not a giveaway. It's not charity. It is an investment in a strong America and in a free world.” ( U.S. Foreign Secretary John Kerry, Speech University of Virginia, 20 February, 2013, reported by Ashad Mohammed of Reuters, Washington, 20 February, 2013.)

“On the whole, the policies and programs of the World Bank Group have been consistent with U.S. interests. This is particularly true in terms of general country allocation questions and sensitive policy issues. The international character of the World Bank, its corporate structure, the strength of the management team, and the Bank’s weighted voting structure have ensured broad consistency between its policies and practices and the long term economic and political objectives of the Unites States.” ( E. Toussaint, Domination of the United States on the World Bank,Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt (CADTM), Series : Bretton Woods, the World Bank and the IMF : 70^th Anniversary, part 01, Bamako, 01 September, 2014.)

“Strip away all the modern PR and prettified palaver and it’s an ugly scramble for oil, minerals, and markets for U.S. goods. Everyone wants a piece of Africa: drooling outsiders, corrupt insiders, cynical middle men.” (J.Feffer, Obama : Into Africa, Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Washington. 06 August, 2014.) speaking of Obama’s Africa Summit and his Power to Africa initiative. At the summit “Obama took the opportunity to announce $7 billion in what the White House describes as "new financing to promote U.S. exports to and investments in Africa." Obama also championed $14 billion in new investments by U.S. corporations in Africa, which includes $5 billion from Coca-Cola for manufacturing equipment. This is in addition to another $12 billion in new commitments for Obama's Power Africa initiative, which will give multinational corporations—including GE—billions of dollars in energy deals to "double the number of people with access to power in Sub-Saharan Africa." The total bill comes to $33 billion for "supporting economic growth across Africa and tens of thousands of U.S. jobs," according to the White House.” (S.Lazare, Obama Pushes Africa Investment as US Corporations “Drool” over Resources, commondreams.org , Portland (Maine), 09 August, 2014.)

The well-known Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has recently been closed down and incorporated in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development following up on the “Harper administration’s increasing interest to align aid efforts with its trade objectives.” ( Ravelo, J.L., CIDA no more?moredevex.com, 22 March, 2013).

“Is the World Bank blinded by an outdated ideology? More likely, its return to mega-dams is driven by institutional self-interest. A strategy paper leaked from the bank in 2011 recognised that the increase in project size "may seem somewhat at odds with the goal of scaling up activities in areas where many potential projects – such as solar, wind and micro-hydropower ... tend to be small". Yet, the paper argued, the "ratio of preparation and supervision costs to total project size" is bigger for small projects than large, centralised schemes, and so bank managers are "disincentivised" from undertaking small projects.

The World Bank, in other words, still finds it easier to spend billions of dollars on mega-projects than to support the small, decentralized projects that are most effective at expanding energy access in rural areas. It appears to be caught in the development model of past decades.” (P. Booshard, The World Bank is bringing back big, bad dams, The Guardian, London, 16 July, 2013.)

Andrew Undershaft in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara ( 1907)( Project Gutenberg Ebook of Major Barbara, Ebook 3790, Salt Lake City, first posted 09 September, 2001) expressed the view that “[Poverty is] the worst of all crimes.”

We should not expect more from the “new” sustainable development goals for the period 2015-2030 than we got from the Millennium Development Goals 2000-2015.

There is no way the world’s rich governments and corporations will allow a meaningful challenge to production and consumption patterns, or a focus on reducing inequality….. No systemic solution can arise from a logic [of the corporate capitalist system and the protection of the status quo] that denies systemic problems.”(Kirk, M., Brewer, J., The Hidden Shallows of Global Poverty “Eradication” Efforts, Commons Dreams, commondreams.org, Portland (Maine), 06 August, 2014.)

Development aid operations provide work, both through «official » organisations such as those linked with the United Nations, and through the tens of thousands of NGOs (non-governmental organisations) interested in development issues. Few reliable statistics on their operations are available.

Aid to the least developed countries now includes debt relief. Outstanding loan capital together with interest and penalties for non-payment can be written off against donors’ aid budgets for the debtor countries. Since the budgeted aid does not increase proportionately, this way the poorest are being called upon to finance their own debt relief.

1. Research.

Make a list of local and foreign development organisations active in your country. How many people work for them ? How many of those working for them are foreigners ?

2. Research.

Make a list of local and foreign development organisation active in your chosen area. How many people work for them ? How many of those working for them are foreigners ?

3. Research.

Make a list of development projects in your project area How many people work for them ? How many of those working for them are foreigners ?

Foreign aid : a very wide definition.

Donor nations have a tendency to define the term “foreign aid” according to their own needs. Aid may, by way of example, include the supply of arms, the training of soldiers and policemen, debt-cancellation, or feasibility studies.

Consider the following factors:

Political competition (for example, the Cold War).

Competition for the control of raw materials (for example, coltan in R.D Congo).

Projects considered too large for local operators to handle (for example, large dams and motorways).

Protection of the economic interests of the donor country.

Influence of past or present colonialism.

4. Opinion.

Make a list of the factors influencing development aid in your chosen area (if there are no projects there, then answer the question for your country).

Where does the money available for development actually go?

Consider aid projects financed by industrialised countries currently under execution in your chosen area. If there are no projects there, then answer the question for your country.

Try to get information on their budgets.

5. Research.

Make an analysis of the budget amounts payable abroad (expatriates salaries; purchase of imported materials; studies carried out abroad; audits; follow-up visits etc) and of the part which is payable “locally”.

Experts, expatriates, everywhere.

Hancock Graham, in Lords of Poverty, McMillan, London 1989, writes at p. 114 :.

“[The «guiders and managers »] have become so pervasive that Africa, for example, has more expatriates living in it today than it ever did during the era of colonisation and settlement :[5] there are an estimated 80.000 foreign “experts” working on development projects in the world’s poorest continent [6]. To this substantial total must be added the legions of short-stay visitors – agency staff on project appraisal missions, VIPs from donor countries, consultants conducting feasibility studies, and, of course, researchers. During the 1970s, when Tanzania’s ujamaa villages were at their most fashionable as examples of successful grassroots development, there were occasions when some villages had more researchers than villagers. [7]

The resources cited by Hancock are :

(5) Famine : A Man-Made Disaster, Report for the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues, Pan Books, London and Sydney, 1985.

(6) E.S.Ayensu, Aid to Africa, paper presenter to the World Commission on Environment and Development, third meeting, Oslo, Norway, 21-8 June 1985.

(7) Johan Galtung, An Anthropology of the United Nations System, in David Pitt and Thomas G. Weiss (eds) The Nature of United Nations Bureaucracies, Croom Helm, London and Sydney, 1986.

6. Opinion.

Are Graham Hancock’s observations applicable today in your project area ?( If there are no projects there, then answer the question for your country).

"Of the more than 1,500 U.S. contracts doled out [ in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake there] , worth 267 million dollars, only 20, worth 4.3 million dollars, have gone to Haitian firms," Dupuy wrote : "The rest have gone to U.S. firms, which almost exclusively use U.S. suppliers. He added, "although these foreign contractors employ Haitians, mostly on a cash-for-work basis, the bulk of the money and profits are reinvested in the United States………...The dual strategy of urban sweatshops and laissez-faire agriculture, which subordinated Haiti in the 1980s, is now it's reconstruction plan.” ( D’Almeida K., Martelly - Clinton Seal Deal for Next Wave of Disaster Capitalism in Haiti, Inter-press Service North America, Washington, 21 April, 2011, citing Alex Dupuy, Professor of Sociology, Wesleyan University. )

Vaccination Campaigns.

Read the notes you made on vaccinations and the role played by pharmaceuticals multinationals in 07. Financial leakage : health and education.

7. Research.

Which vaccination campaigns have been carried out in your project area?

What was the rate of infection of the sicknesses in question before and after the vaccinations?

Read the article How America is Betraying the Hungry Children of Africa, by Alex Renton, Observer, 27 May 2007.

8. Opinion.

Write a review of the article

Now read the article “Miami Rice” : The Business of Disaster in Haiti, by Beverley Bell and Tory Field, Huffington Post, New York, 09 December, 2010.

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