Development Aid - Corruption

Corruption

While development aid is an important source of investment for poor and often insecure societies, aid's complexity and the ever expanding budgets leave it vulnerable to corruption, yet discussing it remains difficult as for many it is a taboo subject. Corruption is very hard to quantify as it is often hard to differentiate it from other problems, such as wastage, mismanagement and inefficiency, to illustrate the point, over $8.75 billion was lost to waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement in the Hurricane Katrina relief effort.

Often a lack of understanding of the process by those meant to be receiving aid leads to cynicism and belief that greed and corruption are the key failures. Non-governmental organizations have in recent years made great efforts to increase participation, accountability and transparency, humanitarian assistance remains a poorly understood process to those meant to be receiving it—much greater investment needs to be made into researching and investing in relevant and effective accountability systems.

However, there is little clear consensus on the trade-offs between speed and control, especially in emergency situations when the humanitarian imperative of saving lives and alleviating suffering may conflict with the time and resources required to minimise corruption risks. Researchers at the Overseas Development Institute have highlighted the need to tackle corruption with, but not limited to, the following methods:

1. Resist the pressure to spend aid rapidly.
2. Continue to invest in audit capacity, beyond simple paper trails;
3. Establish and verify the effectiveness of complaints mechanisms, paying close attention to local power structures, security and cultural factors hindering complaints;
4. Clearly explain the processes during the targeting and registration stages, highlighting points such as the fact that people should not make payments to be included, photocopy and read aloud any lists prepared by leaders or committees.