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October 22, 2011
Foreign Aid Gets Pledged But Not Delivered

There is always some political screaming in the U.S. about foreign aid which is why the Republican candidates want to slash it.

A lot of this is because people do not know how much foreign aid the U.S. is giving. A poll found that people believe that 25% of the government budget goes to foreign aid. In reality it is about 1%.

One reason for this impression may well be that U.S. politicians like to make large pledges of foreign aid even though they do not have the intent of holding such pledges. This leads to tables like this one (pdf) from an analysis of aid pledged and given to Afghanistan since 2002 by Global Humanitarian Assistance.

Less than 30% of the U.S. money pledged to Afghanistan was actually disbursed.


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The money publicly pledged will often not be committed and the money committed might or might not be disbursed. Additionally the disbursement does not say anything about who gets the money and it is more often then not that some civil contractor in Washington DC will get more of the disbursed money than the people it is supposed to reach. And of course none of those numbers says anything about the achieved or not-achieved results.

The diverging numbers on aid to Afghanistan are not much different than pledges to other countries. Of $4.1 billion USAID commitment to Pakistan between 2005 and 2010 only $1.9 billion was disbursed. Numbers on Haiti tell a similar story.

The misperception the people have about foreign aid may well be because the politicians like to use the deceptive numbers. Big pledges make for positive the headlines, real spending does not.

Posted by b on October 22, 2011 at 14:33 UTC | Permalink
Comments

Might be interesting to see who actually receives the bulk of U.S. foreign aid, U.S. contractors and corporate interests, or the people of the receiving nations.

Posted by: ben | Oct 22 2011 15:11 utc | 1

I believe the bulk of US foreign aid is actually WEAPONS…. in that the country receiving the money has to spend it on US made weapons or fighter planes or some such.
So, US foreign “aid” is really a US subsidy for US weapons manufacturers.
And I believe that some of the “aid” in Afghanistan does go to some in-country US contractor, and then gets handed out from there. In a place as poor as Afghanistan, this is a huge amount of money and a major influence on the economy, but very, very little of it actually helps ordinary people. Rather, it fuels corruption.

Posted by: Susan | Oct 23 2011 0:17 utc | 2

In a moment of rare candor (sorry no link) the Pres. of the Fed council of Switzerland at the time, Micheline Calmy-Rey, stated that every One Franc in aid to Africa returned Two Francs to Switzerland.
(She was pleading passionately for more AID.)
AID is an investment, not in the capitalistic sense, but in the control sense. Some goes here, some goes there, some is used for this, or for that, those who give demand a return on gifts, or more properly bribes, etc.
That is why the pledged sums often don’t correspond to the given sums, at the UN and so forth, as the those who pledge AID seek opportunities, if they don’t find them, they renege on the original promise.
They wait to see how the money can be used, for them. So the big pledgers and stingy payers are those on top of the heap, blatantly snarking others. The US is top of the list for not stumping up, but it is not alone, others do the same, or make their bids small so as not to be blamed down the road, etc.

Posted by: Noirette | Oct 23 2011 17:12 utc | 3

It is astonishing how ignorant Americans are of where their money goes. Not only do they think that 25% of the budget goes to feeding those damn foreigners, they also believe, by a large margin, that NASA’s budget consumes another 25%. That number is actually 0.05%. Of course, the disbursement of military “aid,” usually through the form of loop hole grants that skirt nominal budget numbers (FMF) is really just a US defense contractor welfare program. FMF involves grants through various satrapies, which then make their way back to US defense contractors supplying all those fun toys. It’s quite a scam, really.

Posted by: thebhc | Oct 30 2011 20:28 utc | 4

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