Aid and Development
Webpages concerning "Aid and Development"
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Wikipedia-Article "Aid"
- For AID used as an abbreviation, see AID.
- In Wikipedia, AID stands for Article Improvement Drive.
Aid is assistance, often financial, provided to developing countries by developed countries. A variety of terms are used, including foreign aid (especially in the US), international aid and overseas aid.
Many professional aid organisations ("aid agencies") exist, both within government (e.g. USAID, DFID, ECHO), and as private voluntary organizations (or non-governmental organisations, e.g. ActionAid, Oxfam, Mercy Corps). The International Committee of the Red Cross is unique in being mandated by international treaty to uphold the Geneva Conventions.
Aid can be subdivided into two categories: humanitarian aid (emergency relief efforts, eg in response to natural disasters), and development aid, aimed at helping countries to achieve long-term sustainable economic growth, with the aim of achieving poverty reduction. Some aid agencies carry out both kinds of aid, whilst others specialise (eg Red Cross, humanitarian aid; War on Want, development aid).
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Humanitarian aid
- Main article: Humanitarian aid
Humanitarian aid is assistance given to people in distress by individuals, organisations, or governments to relieve suffering, during and after man-made emergencies (like wars) and natural disasters. The term often carries an international connotation, but this is not always the case. It is often distinguished from development aid by being focussed on relieving suffering caused by natural disaster or conflict, rather than removing the root causes of poverty or vulnerability.
Humanitarian aid primarily consists of the provision of vital services (such as food aid to prevent starvation) directly by aid agencies, and the provision of funding or in-kind services (like logistics or transport), usually through aid agencies or the government of the affected country. Humanitarian aid is distinguished from humanitarian intervention, which involves armed forces protecting civilians from violent oppression or genocide by state-supported actors.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is mandated to coordinate the international humanitarian response to a natural disaster or complex emergency (normally linked to conflict), acting on the basis of the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/182.
The Humanitarian Charter of the Sphere coalition of leading private voluntary organisations lists the following principles of humanitarian action:
- . The right to life with dignity.
- . The distinction between combatant and non-combatants.
- . The principle of non-refoulement.
Development aid
- Main articles: Development aid & Foreign aid
Development aid (also development assistance, international aid, overseas aid or - especially in the US - foreign aid) is aid given by developed countries to support economic development in developing countries. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid as being aimed at alleviating poverty in the long term, rather than alleviating suffering in the short term.
The term "development aid" is often used to refer specifically to Official Development Assistance (ODA), which is aid given by governments on certain concessional terms, usually as simple donations. It is given by governments through individual countries' international aid agencies and through multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, and by individuals through development charities such as ActionAid, Care International or Oxfam.
The offer to give development aid has to be understood in the context of the Cold War. The speech in which Harry Truman announced the foundation of NATO is also a fundamental document of development policy. "In addition, we will provide military advice and equipment to free nations which will cooperate with us in the maintenance of peace and security. Fourth, we must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve the suffering of these people.“
Development aid wanted to offer technical solutions to social problems without altering basic social structures. Wherever even moderate changes in these social structures were undertaken, e.g. the land reforms in Guatemala in the early 1950s, the United States usually forcefully opposed these changes.
Quantity
Over the last 20 years, annual ODA has been between $50bn and $60bn. The United States is the world's largest contributor of ODA in absolute terms ($15.7 billion, 2003), but the smallest among developed countries as a percentage of its GDP (0.14% in 2003). The UN target for development aid is 0.7% of GDP; currently only five countries (with Norway in the lead with 0.92%) achieve this.
However, private contributions also make a significant, albeit harder to track, contribution to development aid. Private donations in the United States, for example, are estimated to be at least $34 billion dollars a year, broken down as such:
- International giving by US foundations: $1.5 billion per year
- Charitable giving by US businesses: $2.8 billion annually
- American NGOs: $6.6 billion in grants, goods and volunteers.
- Religious overseas ministries: $3.4 billion, including health care, literacy training, relief and development.
- US colleges scholarships to foreign students: $1.3 billion
- Personal remittances from the US to developing countries: $18 billion in 2000
It is this last figure, remittances, that blurs many definitions of aid: for example, money sent home by foreign workers is counted in this sum. The exact result and effect of remittance money is of some debate: however, even if it is factored out private donations still match ODA in the US. In many cases privately donated money is spent much more effectively than ODA, which must go through various governmental layers before reaching the problem. However, in other cases private sums disappear completely without any trace of their existence. Unfortunately, private aid figures are not tracked so well as ODA in many countries, so it is difficult to make across-the-board comparisons between various nations.
In the United States, popular estimates of spending on aid are often highly inflated - 15-25% of the federal budget is a typical answer; the real number is closer to 1%. In absolute terms, the $15-20bn of aid compares with $50bn spent annually on the war on drugs and $500bn spent on the military. Some commentators, such as Jeffrey Sachs, have said that if the US spent more money on helping the poor, it wouldn't need to spend quite so much on defending itself against them.
Conditions
See tied aid, conditionality, structural adjustment, aid effectiveness
In many cases, aid comes with conditions attached. These conditions may range from demands that some or all of the donated money be spent on goods or services (such as consultancy) from the donor country ("tied aid"), to demands that the recipient privatise various services ("conditionality"). Output-based aid may also be used.
See also
- Timeline of events in humanitarian relief and development
- Attacks on humanitarian workers
- Millennium Development Goals
- Debt relief
- Millennium Challenge Account
- List of development aid agencies
References
- Håkan Malmqvist (2000), "Development Aid, Humanitarian Assistance and Emergency Relief", Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden [1]
- Andrew Rogerson with Adrian Hewitt and David Waldenberg (2004), "The International Aid System 2005–2010 Forces For and Against Change", ODI Working Paper 235 [2]
- "The US and foreign aid assistance" [3]
- Millions Saved A compilation of case studies of successful foreign assistance by the Center for Global Development.
- ActionAid, May 2005, "Real Aid" - analysis of the proportion of aid wasted on consultants, tied aid, etc
External links
Wikipedia-Article "Development"
Development has meaning in several contexts:
Science and Engineering
- Biological development of embryos in the context of developmental biology
- Child development (physical emphasis) or post-natal human development (pediatrics, etc)
- Software engineering, the methodology and process of development of computer software
- Technology development in industry, as in Software development
- New product development in business and engineering.
Social sciences
- Economic development in economics and international relations
- International development, the process of economic and social development in poor countries.
- Child development (psychological emphasis), part of the larger area of human development (psychology) or developmental psychology
- Social development in sociology, the process involved with the evolution of societies
- Urban development in urban planning
Photography and film
- The development process in movie making, aimed at getting a project greenlit
- Film developing is revealing the latent image in a photographic material
The arts and popular culture
- Arrested Development is a television show based upon a company and a family.
- Arrested Development, a hip hop group popular in the early 1990s.
- Development is also a nu-metal album by musical group Nonpoint.
- Musical development
Culture
Business
- Corporate development i.e., fund-raising
- Employee development in business and industry
- Land development or Housing development, also Real estate developer
Other
- Personal development (New Age self improvement!)