Interview with Ahmed Swapan Mahmud on the CIVICUS Blog

Bangladesh is a major recipient of foreign aid money, collecting over 2 billion $US in 2008, according to the latest OECD stats available. The largest portion of this money was spent towards Economic Infrastructure and Services and the vague "Multisector" areas, while less than a fifth of it was spent on Health and Education.

Despite this abundance of money supposedly earmarked for "Official Development Assistance", Bangladesh remains one of the poorest nations in the world, with over 80 percent of the population surviving on less than $2 a day. Why are our efforts at aid failing so miserably?

The answer, according to Ahmed Swapan Mahmud, Executive Director of Voices for Interactive Choice and Empowerment (VOICE) Bangladesh, lies in mutual accountability: owning up to our actions and, more importantly, to each other.

"Donors are reluctant to realize their commitment to the principles of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. Donors do not want to be accountable, yet they try to hold the government accountable...the principle of mutual accountabiliy from the Paris Declaration is ignored. There have been many cases of projects financed by the ADB and WB [which] created environmental degradation and enormous suffering for the people, such as the Sundarbans Bio-diversity  Project (SBCP) and the Khulna-Jessore Drainage Rehabilitation project (KJDRP)," says Swapan, contacted via e-mail.

VOICE is a rights-based, activist organization working mainly on the issues of food sovereignty, aid effectiveness, economic justice, and the right to information and communication, both in Bangladesh and on a global scale, by building a broader constituency of alternative voices to the ‘mainstream development discourse’ through research and public education.

"Sectoral funds from donor countries, in many cases, [are] unrealistic and does not represent the people's expectations. It becomes a patron-client relationship, because the aid is loan money rather than grant money, which the government has to pay back to donors with interest. So aid money, ultimately, is creating a debt burden, which is increasing day by day," Swapan continued.

VOICE is also the founder of the Aid Accountability Group, bringing together members of CSOs and community organizations along with concerned individuals from the political and academic sphere to discuss and stand in solidarity against the ineffective and unaccountable use of aid funding, both regional and international.

"To make aid more effective, the whole architecture of aid management needs to change, by upholding a real commitment to development rather than empty rhetoric and creating a market for business by the donors, and valuing a more equitable democratic process by counting the opinion of all concerned stakeholders including communities and civil societies," he said.

If development agencies really were striving towards the economic independance of developing countries, we should be seeing less and less of them as a measure of their success. Yet, if the prominence of this theme at this year's CIVICUS World Assembly is any indication, aid effectiveness is as present an issue as ever. But perhaps aid is as much a business as any other, rarely given without the promise of some benefit to the donor. If such is the case, and considering the consequences of unchecked economic growth, then it begs the question: is aid really helping?