Aid corruption 'a serious threat'

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Corruption is a serious threat in humanitarian assistance, Sarah Bailey of Britain’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI) warned yesterday.

Corruption, she told a meeting at ODI headquarters in London, was not simply fraud, but included abuses such as "sex for food" demands in Liberia, post-tsunami allocation of houses according to political affiliation in Sri Lanka and the re-sale of relief commodities in Afghanistan.

Defining corruption as "abuse of entrusted power for private gain", Bailey said the highest risk areas were food aid, construction and shelter ("a red flag area"), and high value relief commodities such as tents and medicine.

She and other speakers pointed out that the subject was still widely considered a taboo – "All agencies have suffered some of corruption, but there is reticence to talk about it", said Alex Jacobs, director of MANGO (management accounting for non governmental organisations). "Avoiding scandal… is the aim, not avoiding corruption," he commented. But none of the speakers specifically spelt out that a major reason for secrecy was fear that the public might cut donations.

Bailey noted that aid agencies did not always examine the risks in their work. For example, they sometimes assumed that setting up an elected committee in a relief camp was sufficient, when they needed to ensure that committee members were accountable and open. People receiving aid often knew far better than international NGOs the political and power factors that influenced relief allocations.

In addition, relief systems were often opaque. In northern Uganda (one of four case studies, with Afghanistan, Liberia and Sri Lanka, in a new report, Need and greed: corruption risks, perceptions and prevention in humanitarian assistance) people excluded from relief were repeatedly told that they had been omitted from beneficiary lists because "the computer deleted their names" - but they had no real understanding of computers, the working of the aid distribution system or that computer error was probably not the cause of their exclusion.

Even where aid agencies had set up complaints procedures, they did not always work – particularly when complaints had to be made through the very officials who were the subject of complaints. In northern Uganda "whether or not agencies had official complaints mechanisms was of little consequence in their ability to address complaints, evidenced by the fact that the one agency that actually had a complaints desk was considered the least responsive by aid recipients."

Jacobs agreed that non-financial forms of corruption, particularly diverting aid to the wrong people, was arguably more important than theft. He said that the northern Uganda experience, where aid agencies had "great policies but poor practices", showed that better procedures were not the answer to the problem.

Jacobs emphasised that it was vital to act on the basis that "we are participating in other people’s lives rather than that they are participating in our projects."

Recalling the key lesson from the evaluation of aid for the Asian tsunami - that it was time to move from supplying aid to supporting local communities - he also noted that "in the majority of cases aid does not save lives: this suggests that the idea of saving lives was not a sound basis on which to base a general approach."

He said there was a need to pay attention to the rights of aid recipients.

Fighting corruption, he said, was part of the reform of management in the sector.

Atallah Fitzgibbon, performance improvement manager at Islamic Relief, told the meeting that in terms of waste of aid, poor project design was probably a bigger factor than corruption. Sound training of staff was also vital.

Agencies sometimes had to be more combative: in Aceh, for example, the authorities prescribed where aid agencies’ built homes or who was included on the list for food relief.

Roslyn Hees, senor advisor at Transparency International, said that the corruption taboo had to be ended and the subject put on the table: "We are saying that corruption is not a marginal issue.

"It’s a relatively new topic for discussion. We need to keep talking about it, and to make it more central in the attention span of the humanitarian community."

Transparency International’s approach was to focus on prevention. The organisation was planning to bring out a best practice handbook.

In countries where corruption was endemic, she said, individual agencies had little power but could wield more clout if they were open about the issue and acted together.

* ODI Policy brief

* Mango

* Transparency International