Aid

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Aid (or "international aid", "overseas aid", or "foreign aid", especially in the United States) is the help, mostly economic, which may be provided to communities or countries in the event of a humanitarian crisis or to achieve a socioeconomic objective. Humanitarian aid is therefore primarily used for emergency relief, while development aid aims to create long-term sustainable economic growth. Wealthier countries will typically provide aid to economically developing countries.

Many dedicated aid organisations exist, both within government (eg. USAID, DFID, ECHO), at an international level (eg. United Nations or regional relief agencies), or as the joint effort of diverse nations, peoples or non-governmental organisations acting through international commissions, treaties, conventions or protocols (eg. 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 organisations may provide both kinds of aid, or specialise in humanitarian aid (eg. the Red Cross and Red Crescent), or development aid (eg. the War on Want).

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

Development aid (also development assistance, international aid, overseas aid or - especially in the US - foreign aid) is aid given by develop 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 but has reached over $100bn in 2005Exceeds 100 Billion in 2005, OECDhttp://www.oecd.org/document/40/0,2340,en_2649_34447_36418344_1_1_1_1,00.html. 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 when people are asked in surveys - 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.

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.

US aid and human rights

Lars Schoultz found in a 1981 study that US aid "has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens,...to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights."

Reviewing Latin American Aid, Martha Huggins suggested in 1998 that “the more foreign police aid given the US, the more brutal and less democratic the police institutions and their governments become.”

Ineffectivity

Humanitarian aid has been very ineffective, this is because plan's have not been made from the ground up but from top down. As described by William Easterly (ex-UN member), the (third world) countries that have made the most progress, are those that were never successfully colonised.

Notes

Lars Schoultz, “U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights Violations in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Aid Distributions”, Comparative Politics, Volume 13, Number 2, January 1981 (2 of the graphs from the study can be found here)
Martha Knisely Huggins, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America, Duke University Press (July 1998) ISBN 0822321726 p. 6

References

Håkan Malmqvist (2000), "Development Aid, Humanitarian Assistance and Emergency Relief", Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden ^*
The White Man's Burden : Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly
Andrew Rogerson with Adrian Hewitt and David Waldenberg (2004), "The International Aid System 2005–2010 Forces For and Against Change", ODI Working Paper 235 ^*
"The US and foreign aid assistance" ^*
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

Public Private Dialogue A resource for aid practitioners wishing to promote development through involvement of stakeholders (sponsored by World Bank, IFC, OCED, DFID, GTZ)
OECD Development Co-operation Directorate (DAC)
AiDA: Accessible Information on Development Activities
www.realityofaid.org
Aid Harmonization: What Will It Take to Meet the Millennium Development Goals?

Development | International relations | Sustainability | Humanitarian aid

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