W.Bank urges better aid to fight food, fuel squeeze
GHANA: High fuel and food prices are threatening millions with
poverty and the world needs to find more flexible and effective ways of
delivering aid to fight this “double jeopardy”, the World Bank president
said on Thursday.
Robert Zoellick told a conference that channelling aid through the
national budgets of recipient nations, supporting their capacity to
handle it and promoting a dynamic private sector were all ways of
improving development assistance.
“It’s common sense that we have to make aid work better,” Zoellick
said, speaking at a High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness being held in
Accra, Ghana, and attended by development experts, ministers and senior
officials.
The World Bank chief said sharp increases in global food and fuel
prices had complicated efforts to reduce poverty.
“It is double jeopardy (that) fuel and food prices could push a 100
million people back to poverty, thereby reversing the efforts of we the
people in this room,” Zoellick said.
He called for the lifting of export bans on food imposed by some
countries, saying this was hampering the WFP’s ability to obtain food
quickly to respond to humanitarian needs.
Critics say the effectiveness of more than $100 billion of
international aid that is channelled to the developing world each year
is often undermined and obstructed by bureaucratic bottlenecks, delays,
overlapping and political interests.
Concerns about corruption and the squandering of aid, especially in
weak states in Africa, have also triggered debate about how much donor
governments should try to maintain control and oversight over their aid
programmes.
Recipient countries insist the aid must follow their own development
strategies.
The Ghana aid meeting ended on Thursday with the adoption of an Accra
Agenda for Action spelling out ways in which delivery of international
aid can be made more effective.
In his speech, Zoellick backed the idea of most development aid being
channelled through national budgets of receiving countries.
It was critical that governments receiving assistance took a “driving
seat” in shaping development projects, he said.
ACCRA, Friday, Reuters |
