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Viewpoint
Letters to the editor
Information society requires education
1/2004 |
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Letters to the editor
[ Ghana under Rawlings and Kufuor, D+C 2003:10, p. 368 ]
Incapable of reform
Most of the observations in the article by Heinrich Bergstresser are right. However, the fact that the donors are chiefly responsible for Ghana's present economic and financial problems is not given the attention it deserves. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank failed terribly with their finance monitoring and allowed Ghana to drift into bad inflation from 1997 to 2001. That the Ghanaian government also is responsible for a great lack of both political and economic professionalism is not disputed. All bilateral donors have in the meantime made Ghana a priority country, which is overtaxed by the ensuing over-promotion. The country is not being given what it and its economy needs, but what ideologically motivated donors be-lieve they should give. Hardly anyone is interested in what happened to the money. Post-evaluation: completely unknown.
Then there is the absurdity that food aid is granted, although the country produces enough. And it could produce much more if the farmers were simply given market-oriented incentives and an infrastructure. Instead, they are pestered with new cultivation technologies and new seed that none of them wants because there are no markets for increased production.
Development assistance has – unfortunately – become an international job creation measure by the donors. The well-qualified Ghanaian seeks a well-paid position abroad as soon as pos-sible because he has no chance at home. Instead, the multilateral donors above all send so-called experts of often dubious quality, who – before they have arrived in the country – know everything better. And the BMZ deals only with the 'developmental big pictures' (although, as is well-known, it's the little things that always cause the problems) and more or less without monitoring leaves the daily work to the implementing organisations, which for their part dele-gate implementation to their office on-site.
Will Chancellor Schröder be given a well-informed briefing before he “drops by” Ghana for a few hours on January 23? Probably not, and it may well not interest him, since he has quite different problems at home. But both countries do indeed have a fundamental aspect in com-mon: Ghana and Germany are highly incapable of reform.
Christian Potyka, Ministerial Counsellor (retd), Accra
[ The new US development aid,
D+C 2003:4,
p. 140 ]
US policy not sensitive enough
We now generally acknowledge that US aid’s top priority during the Cold War was almost entirely related to the competition with the Soviet Union over the allegedly nonaligned countries. The outlines of the Millennium Challenge Account suggest a parallel approach, this time for the United States’s near evangelical global mission and its interests. The very nature of socio-economic development seems too little understood by even the best informed such as Carol Lancaster, who wisely acknowledges that in writing that “aid for development is very much experimental”. The more politically, ideologically driven present American Administration and the Congressional decision makers are, on the face of it, far more narrowly informed and motivated, and so are hardly likely to produce much effect on behalf of the Millennium Goals centered on poverty reduction.
My own experience of some 25 years of 3rd World NGO work suggests two central principles for even a chance at reducing poverty. First, and most obvious, is to make as certain as possible that the leadership in the recipient country is strongly committed to poverty reduction. Second: Very long term commitment from the donor side to overall socio-economic development and to many of the specific projects. Lancaster suggests the complexity and uncertain consequences of what must in large part be an effort at sometimes deep cultural change. Among other things this usually requires that any foreigner involved in design, management and implementation at any level should ideally have previous close association and knowledge of the recipient’s context of intertwined history, culture, geography and governance. Without this past, an effort at such immersion should be given generous, adequate time before substantive program or project work.
This second principle runs against every past pattern in America’s political culture. However, without this major adjustment, US “experiments” with poverty reduction – if that ever becomes the American priority – will have extremely low levels of long term success.
Alvin G. Edgell, Kent, Ohio, USA
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