With an ambitious goal to save lives of more than 16 million women and children, preventing 33 million unwanted pregnancies, protecting 120 million children from pneumonia and 88 million children from stunting, a much-hyped three-day Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Review Summit concluded in New York last month. The summit churned out an action plan with heads of state, governments from developed and developing countries, along with the private sector, international organizations and civil society pledging over $40 billion for the next five years.
Colossal aid that goes to poor countries in the next five years equally runs the risk of being misused and misappropriated in absence of strong anti-corruption measures properly married to pro-MDG initiatives. The recently endorsed MDG action plan points to the importance of combating corruption but fails to strategize concrete actions for translating promises into deeds. This strategic insensitivity to ensure anti-corruption measures may push back the global targets. Sheer accountability and transparency principles may be inadequate unless aid-recipient countries strictly adopt and comply with corruption-control measures in their national MDG policies and programs. Corruption and poor governance undermine global efforts and increase the risk of funds being lost, misused or misallocated.
Where transparency and accountability mechanisms are weak, needs of the poor are put aside and development outcomes in basic service sectors such as education, health and water, among others, suffer the most. Systems of checks and balances, including civil society oversight, need to be strengthened to reduce such abuses of power and diversion of funds for private gains. The latest UN figures reveal one in six people in the world live in extreme poverty. More than 70 million primary school-aged children are missing from their classrooms. In the developing world, skilled health workers are found at less than two-thirds of all births, a figure which is up by only 10 percent from 1990.
The UN estimates that global poverty can be reduced from 46 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2015. Even if this is attained on average, this would mask big variation across regions and countries. For instance, 17 percent of the population in East Asia lived in extreme poverty in 2005 compared to 51 percent in Africa. But the economic crisis seems to have pushed another 64 million people into poverty. Prior to the global economic crisis and rising inflation, Latin America and Asia (driven by China) were on their way to halving the undernourishment. But, the dual crises have undermined the progress globally. Nearly one billion people are now undernourished, which is a worrying increase since 1990.
COST OF CORRUPTION
Progress on various MDGs is inalienably linked to effective governance. For instance, developing countries with high levels of corruption have a substantially greater portion of the population living in extreme poverty than countries with moderate corruption.
A Transparency International´s (TI) recent survey shows that corruption is holding back efforts toward achieving MDG targets. Where there is more bribery, there is less progress on education, maternal health and access to clean water including other goals. World leaders and decision-makers must ensure that anti-corruption efforts are integrated fully within MDG initiatives over the next five years. It also demonstrates that increased transparency, accountability and integrity translate into better MDG targets and outcomes.
Progress on various MDGs is inalienably linked to effective governance. For instance, developing countries with high levels of corruption have a substantially greater portion of the population living in extreme poverty than countries with moderate corruption. The TI´s report reveals that in countries where the frequency of bribe payments is higher, literacy, maternal mortality and access to clean water are negatively affected. The World Bank estimates that more than $1 trillion is paid in bribes annually. The costs can be even higher when bribery and other forms of corruption are not effectively contained.
As an implicit cost, bribery and other illegal payments may prevent citizens from accessing basic services like clean water, education and health care. In Moldova, Europe’s poorest country, health care workers allegedly demand bribes equal to one’s monthly salary to provide routine care covered under the public health care system. As an explicit cost, rampant absenteeism among teachers and doctors, for example, can lead to shuttered public schools and hospitals. Without alternatives, the poorest are often forced to go without these services.
The TI´s analysis on access to drinking water in 51 countries suggests that lower levels of bribery translate into improved availability of clean water. With 2.6 billion people not having access to basic sanitation services such as toilets, the sanitation target is likely to be missed. If the current trend continues, the number is expected to climb to 2.7 billion by 2015. In developing counties, corruption is estimated to raise the price of connecting a household to a water network by as much as 30 percent to 45 percent. Resident of the poorer countries that are off the national supply grid pays more for water than people living in London, New York or Rome. Wide scale corruption in water sector means that achieving the MDG target of improved access to water will cost an estimated $48 billion more than has been planned. Around 20 percent to 70 percent of lost resources in water can also be saved if corruption is reduced.
Similarly, countries with good marks on anti-corruption legislation show reduced rates of maternal mortality. There is also a strong correlation between greater public access to information and higher literacy rates for a nation’s youth. Worldwide, 75 million children fail to complete primary school either because they drop out in the early grades or because they never get the chance to attend school at all. The TI survey from 42 countries shows that the increased practice of paying bribes is directly associated with a lower literacy rate among 15 to 24 age groups. Survey in seven African countries shows that 44 percent of the parents had paid bribes to get their children admitted to schools.
As in the education sector, bribery and informal payments too often afflict a country´s health system. But the effect of corruption in health can be immediate, resulting in death. The World Bank data shows 536,000 women die in childbirth annually worldwide. The prevalence of fake drugs in China is estimated to result in 200,000 to 300,000 deaths annually. A recent study by Amnesty International on maternal health in Burkina Faso, a West African country, reported that corruption among medical personnel is one of the main causes of death among thousands of women during pregnancies.
Siphoning off funds from health budget is also a common story from Azerbaijan to Uganda to Liberia. Anti-corruption investigators in Liberia discovered a discrepancy that totaled almost $4 million in unaccounted-for funds or roughly 20 percent of the ministry´s total health budget. The TI findings based on data from 64 countries suggest that an increase in bribery is associated with an increase in maternal mortality, regardless of how wealthy a country is or how much it spends on the sector. While the costs are diverse, corruption’s impact on the MDGs is clear.
IS AID ALONE ENOUGH?
If the MDGs are to be achieved by 2015, donors and national policy makers must explicitly link development and governance as two sides of the same coin. Marrying the two supports not only the success of the MDGs but also the realization of the past global commitments. These include government pledges made to fight corruption, achieve aid effectiveness and improve development financing, as a part of the UN Convention against Corruption, Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, Accra Agenda for Action and the Doha Declaration on Financing for Development. Hefty aid alone will not be sufficient to ensure that goals are met. "Massive aid infusions can be harmful as well when there is no receiving capacity of the countries", writes a New York University economist William Easterly in his book The White Man´s Burden: Why the West´s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. Similarly, the World Bank Institute´s governance director Daniel Kaufmann writes, "Calls for donors to meet aid commitments related to the MDGs are justified, but so are demands for donors and recipient countries alike to fulfill pledges related to good governance, transparency and accountability in industrialized and developing countries."
Development aid can be maximized only when there is satisfying level of governance in aid recipient countries followed by transparent allocations. The aid does not yield good results when bad governance and corruption are rampant. To have a better link between development and anti-corruption initiatives, governments, donors, parliamentarians, civil society, private sector, citizens and other stakeholders should adopt and integrate anti-corruption measures in their MDG programs to fully realize the goals in the next five years and sustain the progress beyond 2015. They also must allow and ensure greater public oversight of where and how the aid is spent. This will help citizens to hold their governments accountable for receiving and spending funds. More aid alone will not shoo away global problems until recipient countries ensure its proper use and effectiveness.
pbhattarai2001@gmail.com
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