‘War on terrorism’ threatens aid budgets

POLITICS as much as any inexact science is open to fads.

But while policies and principles can be switched around to suit the prevailing fashion of the moment, the one thing that cannot be changed is the pot of money available to pay for them.

Usually what happens is that those put in charge of implementing the latest big thing to hit the political scene look around to see what budget line they can divert to fund it.

Aid agencies now fear their budgets may now be in danger not from a drop in public support but from the “war on terrorism.”

Many Governments now believe countries with poor governance and security result in poverty which gives rise to terrorism.

They argue there can be no development without security and see the answer primarily as sending in military aid.

The problem for the NGOs arise when the politicians and policy makers take the next step and say that security is then a development issue, and should be paid for out of development budgets.

This issue was highlighted by the Alliance 2015 group, a body representing a number of international aid agencies, in Brussels recently.

They believe there is a danger that money targeted to eradicate poverty will be sidelined into paying for the military and weapons.

Paddy Maguinness of Concern, a member of Alliance 2015, said they fear security issues rather than the Millennium Development goals, agreed by 140 heads of state and governments in 2000, will dictate how and where money will be spent in the future.

The Millennium goals prioritised the eradication of hunger and poverty, promotion of basic education, healthcare, gender equality, sustainable development and the fight against HIV/AIDS and set targets for the year 2015.

Mr Maguinness said there was a lot of “fuzzy thinking” about security even among aid agencies.

“Development budgets are always vulnerable. You need stability for development and democracy but we disagree that you pay an army out of the development budget in the name of bringing stability to a country,” he said.

The OECD decides what spending constitutes a countries contribution towards the UN target of 0.7% of GDP for overseas development and is debating whether security costs constitute aid spending.

One of the countries leading the debate is Holland who are anxious that security spending should come from development budgets. They have just taken over the EU Presidency and so Alliance 2015 is doubly worried.

The European Union contributes about €30 billion a year making it by far the world’s biggest donor of overseas development aid but the alliance said much of the EU funding is not achieving its goals.

The first review of how these targets are being met will be carried out next year, but according to Alliance 2015 the results will be very meagre.

According to their study the EU is spending only 0.33% of its funds on basic education, 0.22% to gender and just 1.5% on basic healthcare.

Japp Dijkstra, President of Alliance 2015 there is a huge gap between EU policies and their implementation.

He said there have been too few impact assessments carried out in the countries that receive assistance to find out if the funding is having the required result.

“It’s a question of political will and priorities. They were able to allocate €160 million to the war in Iraq this year. If we are to end world poverty we need to change our priorities.”