Promises to keep

The Donor Conference

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Despite Prime Minister Sushil Koirala’s assurance of zero-tolerance on corruption in relation to the funds pledged at the International Conference on Nepal’s Reconstruction on Thursday, our bilateral and multilateral donors are far from assured. This was the reason almost all of them who made pledges after Koirala’s opening remarks—pledges worth a total of US $4.4 billion, according to the government—also emphasized the need for a high level of transparency. This won’t be easy in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. But, as donors suspect, if the funds coming in don’t reach the intended beneficiaries, no amount of international help can restore the broken lives of hundreds of thousands of earthquake victims. This is, of course, assuming that donors are honest themselves.

Recent studies on the effectiveness of foreign aid in Nepal have found that most of the aid money—as much as 90 percent by some estimates—go into covering overhead costs and sky-high fees of international consultants. Since many of the donors will channel their disaster funds through their Nepal-based INGOs, there is plenty of room for skepticism. So our donors also need to be transparent about how they spend their disaster funds. They are accountable not only to their governments back home, but also to the intended beneficiaries of their projects. Again, donors are reluctant to put their money into the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund or to offer budgetary support because they don’t trust the government enough. But we would still like to see them contribute more to government coffers. In return, they can ask for a high level of transparency every step of the process. This in turn will help in the building of robust national institutions. There can be no bigger contribution to post-earthquake Nepal than helping restore people’s trust in their government.
There are other concerns as well. It is unclear how the government arrived at the figure of US $4.4 billion. The individual pledges at the donor conference on Thursday were hard to add up since many countries said that at least part of their pledges would fund existing projects. Individual member states of the European Union made separate pledges, while an EU delegate made a collective pledge, adding to the confusion. Other pledges were conditional, the disbursement depending on Nepal’s ability to keep convincing the donors that their money was being spent well. Whatever the case, we would like to request all of our donors, big and small, to invest in projects aimed at improving the country’s resilience against future natural disasters and helping earthquake victims get back into gainful employment. It would be extremely dangerous to make them perpetually dependent on donor handouts. In that case, we could have another Haiti in the making. In this time of national mourning, we truly are also overcome by the goodwill and generosity shown by our donors and people from around the world. We now hope the solemn promises, made by both the government as well as donors to earthquake victims, will not be forgotten in the months and years ahead.