The real Africa is hidden

The Columbia Journalism Review has a great piece on why non-governmental organizations prefer bad news about Africa and how that prevents westerners from getting a more nuanced picture about life on the continent.

AfricaAvenir

Deutsche Welle's Inspired Minds program had an interview with Prince Kum' a Ndumbe III, a Cameroonian poet, playwright and scholar living in Europe. After studying in Germany and France, he decided to devote his life to "the uplifting and rehabilitation of African culture."

The scholar created a foundation, called AfricAvenir, devoted to this cause.

Their website, which has news in English, French and German, is definitely worth a look... although some of the internal links don't appear to work.

Does food aid hurt or help?

That is the question being asked by the charity CARE, reports The International Herald-Tribune.

I alluded to some of the problems in the food aid distribution system in an earlier essay and CARE's assessment bears this out.

CARE, one of the world's biggest charities, is walking away from about $45 million a year in federal funding, saying American food aid is not only plagued with inefficiencies, but may hurt some of the very poor people it aims to help.

Its decision, which has deeply divided the world of food aid, is focused on the practice of selling tons of American farm products in African countries that in some cases compete with the crops of struggling local farmers.

[...]

"The NGOs have been ignoring this evidence for years that there's a negative impact on the prices farmers receive," said [Peter] Matlon, [an agricultural economist based on Nairobi, Kenya] who is involved in a $150 million effort financed by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations to increase the productivity of African farmers.

CARE concluded that dumping surplus American food lowered prices paid to domestic farmers and thus undermined broader anti-poverty efforts.

More media scrutiny of development aid

A column in The Christian Science Monitor calls for more critical reporting of the international aid business.

While there is plenty of reporting on corruption by governments themselves, the author claims that aid organizations themselves regularly cover up managerial dysfunction, including sexual harassment, by ignoring the actions of those responsible. This includes a UN agency director in Geneva lying about his age to stay in power longer, the misappropriation of US funds by private contractors in the Middle East, and the placement of inappropriate personnel in well-paid UN positions by in-house "mafiosi" to the detriment of more qualified individuals.

There are also turf wars among agencies supposedly designed to help the people.

Numerous projects, too, are poorly coordinated as a result of interagency UN rivalries or inappropriate expertise among contracted consultancy firms, and sometimes such initiatives are implemented for the wrong reasons.

But NGOs can be hesitant to criticize the strings that come with aid money, no matter how nonsensical they may be.

NGOs, which rely heavily on donor funding, can cite innumerable examples of aid that makes little sense, they are cautious about criticizing their benefactors. One aid administrator in London pointed out that even when known to be part of a questionable political agenda, "it's still your bottom line."

Some UN member states have presented a plan to revamp the international aid structure but the columnist concludes that Many member states, however, have too much to lose from a truly open UN.