Poor people in underdeveloped countries suffer from endless petty corruption. British aid programmes should be redesigned to make this less likely, even if this offends governments
Local communities in Nepal have for more than a decade benefited from a British-funded support programme which allowed them to implement their own projects for schools, bridges and other needs in a way combining democratic participation with spending procedures that limited opportunities for corruption. It was a success story for British foreign aid, which surely pointed toward an expansion of the scheme. Instead the programmes have been cut by more than half, because the Nepalese central government wanted to take over the work, which will now be both more distant from those it is supposed to serve and more open to the corrupt diversion of funds.
This is one of a number of telling examples in a new report on the performance of the Department for International Development (DfID), Britains aid agency. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) has concentrated in particular on what it sees as DfIDs failure to systematically confront everyday corruption. The bribes for access to education, healthcare, schooling, employment and justice which strip poor people of their meagre resources make a hard life even harder. It must be a cause for concern when British taxpayers money either makes little difference to this situation or, in some cases, according to ICAI, may even make it worse.
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