POVERTY: Economic crisis hits health aid that has helped millions as donors cut back

geoffrey york : Nov. 23, 2011
Wealthy donors in Europe and elsewhere are drastically cutting back on contributions to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. As a result, in an unprecedented step, the fund has announced that it is cancelling its next round of grants, despite strong protests from health activists.
The impact could be huge. More than 70 per cent of life-saving AIDS medicine in the developing world, and about 85 per cent of TB programs in Africa, are financed by the Global Fund. The cancellation of its next round of grants will have a direct impact on tens of thousands of impoverished people living with HIV who depend on foreign financing for their medicine, analysts say.
The cuts by donor governments are not just because of the economic slowdown and the financial crisis in Europe, but also because of concerns over corruption in several recipient countries. Some donors, including Germany and Sweden, have frozen their donations because of the misuse of health grants in four recipient nations.
The Global Fund has fallen into “the most dire financial situation it has ever seen since its creation,” according to a statement on Wednesday by Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders).
There is a “shocking incongruence” between the financial cuts and the latest scientific evidence suggesting that an expansion of HIV treatment could be a crucial step toward eliminating the AIDS epidemic, MSF said.
“Donors are really pulling the rug out from under people living with HIV/AIDS at precisely the time when we need to move full-steam ahead and get life-saving treatment to more people,” the group said.
Stephen Lewis, the former United Nations special envoy on AIDS in Africa, warned that the funding cancellation will cost thousands of lives. “It’s incredible that so many countries should default on their commitments at exactly the moment when we know what to do to defeat the pandemic,” he said. “I don’t know how the financial architects of this disaster sleep at night.”
A leading advocacy group, Health Global Access Project, said the donor countries are “betraying” poor people and pushing the Global Fund “to the edge of a cliff.”
The cuts were announced just two days after the UN released dramatic new data on AIDS, showing how the increase in financing from donors such as the Global Fund over the past few years has helped prevent the death of 700,000 people and reduce the number of new infections by 30 to 50 per cent.
In addition to the cancellation of the next round of grants, there is mounting evidence that some donors are failing to fulfill their existing pledges, leading to turmoil among many recipients.
The most famous AIDS activist group in South Africa, Treatment Action Campaign, says it will be forced to close its doors and dismiss its 230 workers by the end of January unless it receives a much-delayed grant that was originally supposed to arrive in July. “We face a real crisis,” the group said.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/economic-crisis-hits-global-fund-to-fight-aids-tuberculosis-and-malaria/article2246908/

GLOBAL FUND: Nigeria: grants frozen

A major foreign financier of AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria activities in Nigeria, The Global Fund has temporarily frozen grants to one of its principal recipients in the country, Yakubu Gowon Centre for alleged misappropriation of funds, Daily Trust reports
In a report filed before the Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission by the Global Fund, the Yakubu Gowon Centre is alleged to have illegally transferred funds outside the country amounting to $15.5million, incurred extra budgetary expenditures of $5.2million and has undocumented fund amounting to $3million.The centre which was established to honour former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon has been in existence since 1992, embarking on programmes to reduce poverty and fight diseases....

http://allafrica.com/stories/201106300692.html

MALARIA: Sierra Leone: Quarter of Vital Donated Drugs Missing or Stolen

14 Jun 2011 : IPS News
Sierra Leone - Three-year-old David bolts up from his feverish stooper as a needle pricks his thumb, producing a tiny bead of blood. He looks down horrified but is too exhausted to cry and falls back into his mother's lap as the blood is wiped away. Juane K. Nabieu, a community health officer in the district's main Peripheral Health Unit (PHU) drops the specimen of blood onto a strip. Within seconds two fine lines appear and David's mother Naomi Sam is told that her son has malaria.
Malaria is endemic in the country - it is one of the biggest killers of children. David is lucky. He is treated with the last batch of Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACT) that Nabieu has just collected from the neighbouring district government drug storeroom. But poor record keeping, wastage and theft may be responsible for the loss of a quarter of vital aids drugs that have gone missing from the central government warehouse in Freetown, denying other children like three-year-old David the chance of survival.
The regular UNICEF stocktake found a preliminary figure of 25 percent of the aid was unaccounted for, UNICEF said in a statement on Jun. 14. The drugs are thought to include vital life-saving drugs like ACT. "An internal stock take report revealed the possible loss of drugs destined for government health clinics and that we asked the authorities to review... At present we are still looking into how much of the losses can be attributed to poor record keeping at health centres and district warehouses or to wastage due to improper storage or theft."
A UNICEF representative said that the internal stock take began at the end of 2010, and has just been completed. It reviewed stocks from the rural health posts across the country in a bottom-up check of drugs. It also follows reports from district hospitals across the country and PHUs about an ongoing shortage of ACT, vital in the treatment of malaria. At the Khailahun PHU there are only two more packets of ACT left - serving 156 PHUs. When the remaining doses run out, Nabieu, will refer his patients to the government district hospital.
"Most of the people who come here will not be able to afford the ACT sold privately - they rely on the free drugs," he says sitting behind a desk with an array of medicine bottles all lined up in front of him. "You can see we have many drugs, but the supply of fast moving essential ones like ACT always arrives in spurts - every month there is a shortage, and every month there will be people who suffer because of it." Sierra Leone's government took a massive step when it announced last April that health care for children under five and pregnant women would be free. The Free Health Care Initiative is 90 percent funded by international donors like UNICEF, the African Development Bank, UNFPA and the government of Sierra Leone.
In Khailahun district, drugs that were given as aid by the Global Fund and UNICEF are reported to be found in private drugs shops and sold by street market traders. "We have patients who come from neighbouring Liberia, which puts a strain on our resources, but the drugs in the local market may also be drugs that have come from Liberia or Guinea - the aid that comes into West Africa is generic and that makes it easy to sell anywhere," Nabieu explains. On the other side of Khailahun town, at the district hospital, things are no better. In the paediatric ward, tightly packed with mothers and babies all eerily quiet, nurse Alice Mansaray has a stack of paperwork and a new baby with complications from malaria to admit.
"Most children come to us with severe anaemia or convulsions - sometimes their mothers suppress their child's fever with paracetamol, when there are no free stocks of ACT in their PHUs, and they can't afford the private drugs. "When I run out of ACTs I send them to a private drug store. They have to go because they can't see their children die. We have seen more cases of malaria and more children with complications," she says as she holds up a strip of ACT. Though the government's hospital monitors say malaria cases have decreased compared to last year in Khailahun, there is no record kept of how many patients come back with complications. There is also no record of those who were entitled to free drugs, or who had to purchase them from the private sector because of the shortage of aid.
The Civil Society organisation, Health for All Coalition (HFAC), implemented a monitoring system, parallel to the government's. Alhassan Kamara at HFAC estimates that 45 to 50 percent of the aid that comes in disappears finding its way to the market - though no survey has been conducted to substantiate this. "Our monitors travel in drug delivery trucks. We insist community and district hospital representatives receive the consignment." This has reduced the "leakages" Kamara calls the thefts. "Transportation from district to the PHU needs to be strengthened. There is less transparency, and scope to sell on route."
This is not the first time such irregularities have been discovered in Sierra Leone. In 2008 a BBC report discovered UNICEF's malaria drugs in Kono (Eastern Province) were being re-sold in private pharmacies. "If there was such mass pilfering, the system would collapse," says Dr Amara Jambai, director of Disease Prevention and Control at the ministry of health and sanitation. "The community are very active and watch supplies very closely." Jambai admits that the capacity of the government is too weak to deliver the drugs to each PHU. "The cause of the shortage is not because there are thefts, but because demand is great, and the system is new."
The district hospitals in Khailahun, Pujehan in the South, and Bo in Central Sierra Leone, say that when they have approached Freetown for ACT, they still have supply issues. Pujehan hospital said they had not received a delivery since February - though they had a small supply remaining of ACT, other essentials like antibiotics and paracetamol had long been unavailable. Mahimbo Mdoe, UNICEF country representative says that UNICEF is due to take over the operation to run the logistics themselves. "We are hiring an international company to manage the central warehouse, and they will be responsible for doing a "milk-round" to all 1,200 PHU's across the country. "A year ago 80 percent of people didn't go to the doctors because of the cost. Sierra Leone is a fragile state. The numbers of people accessing the aid for the first time is an important step forward."
Meanwhile, Naomi Sam says that she could not have gone to the private drug store to buy the ACT that has just saved David's life if it were unavailable, because "I have no money," she says simply. She knows that coming to the PHU means that David will get free treatment. But, the 20 or so women with sick babies waiting outside may not be so lucky today.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56071

POVERTY: Head of USAid: one of his biggest challenges is to persuade Americans that foreign aid is in their interests

Madeleine Bunting 15 June 2011
Rajiv Shah is one of the most powerful men in development policy – and one of the youngest. He arrived at the helm of the US development agency USAid just short of 37, as the highest ranking Indian-American in any presidential administration. Six days into the job, Haiti's earthquake struck and he was plunged into an intense three months of one of the biggest US aid initiatives in recent decades.
Nor has the pace or intensity of the job eased much since, but in London on Tuesday he was delighted as an audience of academics and activists – not usual enthusiasts for US aid policy – at the London School of Economics congratulated him several times for his commitments on food and health initiatives, in particular the US pledge of $450m to the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi) on Monday.
The appreciation must make a change from the fierce battle in Washington over USAid's budget, which is the target of a House of Representatives bill for $121m in cuts. At a time of economic hardship in the US, opinion surveys show aid's unprecedented unpopularity. One of Shah's biggest challenges right now, he told the Guardian, is persuading the American people that aid is in their interests.
"On the logo of USAid, it says "from the American people", but our work has to be seen as "for the American people", Shah argues. "Development is a fundamental part of our national security. It is extreme poverty – the realities of access to water and food – which creates the long-term drivers of our insecurity. Most wars are fought over scarce resources, and that is going to accelerate in the future. The food spike of 2008 led to food riots and instability. Bob Gates [the outgoing secretary of state for defence] has said, 'It is cheaper to do development than to send soldiers'. Admiral Mike Mullen [chairman of the joint chiefs of staff] is one of our strongest advocates."
In fact, the Pentagon has been a stalwart defender of USAid's budget in the current battles on Capitol Hill. An interesting contrast to the UK, where the defence establishment has been eyeing the aid budget with envy – and some resentment. Shah's defence of aid in terms of national interest reflects Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton's overhaul of US foreign policy, which was spelled out in the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review late last year. Shah in part attributes the increased emphasis on aid to the experience of Afghanistan and Iraq, where the military has recognised the crucial role of governance and development to an exit strategy.
On Afghanistan, Shah is defiant of the many critics. Last week a congressional report damned USAid's programme there, and said much of the $18.8bn of funding had been "poorly spent" and was unlikely to prove durable. Afghanistan and Pakistan are the top two recipients of USAid by a large measure.
"It's been costly. We've lost 300 people working for USAid or our partners in eight years and it's cost a lot of money, but we have gone from 900,000 children in school to 7 million. Two and half million of them are girls. Health access has gone from 9% to 64% with huge falls in morbidity. Five million have moved out of poverty, with economic growth rates of 8%-10%. Agricultural productivity is up by 50%-70%. A huge amount has been achieved.
"Now our challenge is how to make that sustained as we embrace the transition. It's been a tough environment, and we have trebled staff in Afghanistan to improve accountability and audit our partners because of concerns about corruption."
But the subject that is probably closest to Shah's personal interests is food security. For seven years, he was director of programmes at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on agriculture. And well before that, he remembers as a small boy visiting India for the first time with his parents from his home in suburban Detroit and experiencing with shock the slums of Mumbai and the acute human suffering he saw there. That childhood experience is what has driven his career.
"The 2008-09 food crisis pushed 100 million people back into poverty. We have been here before. In the late 60s, Paul Ehrlich was warning of a population bomb in which millions would starve, but that led to US agronomist, Norman Borlaug and his work on the green revolution – which has saved hundreds of millions of lives. We have learned a lot now about the environmental degradation it caused.
"But Africa was bypassed, and in 2006 the US was spending only $240m of its aid budget on agriculture, less than 3%. We have now increased that to $1.2bn in a programme, Feed the Future, which is working in 20 countries. The aim is to lift more than 18 million out of poverty and ensure that 7.1 million children are no longer malnourished."
Shah sees a big role for the private sector in this programme but also emphasises that the biggest impact on poverty will come from reaching small-scale women producers. USAid is working with co-operatives in countries such as Uganda.
"This is a structural challenge in global development: there are agrarian economies where large numbers of families devote 70% of their income to food, and that makes them highly susceptible to price shocks. A huge risk."
He believes that the right combination of technology and political will can have a huge impact in tackling this challenge, and points to the past as a reminder of what aid can achieve. "The Marshall plan for Europe after the second world war, the green revolution and oral rehydration are three examples of initiatives which have saved millions of lives. The last was the invention of USAid when diarrhoea was ravaging families in many developing countries and much of the effort was focused on extending healthcare services. But a simple rehydration solution given to mothers has empowered them to save their children's lives. It's one of the greatest success stories of aid. Not only does it save lives, it reduces the disease burden of stunted development."
On such subjects, Shah is a powerful advocate for aid, but question him on controversial aspects of US development policy, such as subsidies to US cotton farmers that hit west Africa so badly, and he becomes vague – an indication of how USAid can find its work undermined by other government department policies such as on trade or agriculture.
He was also evasive about the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which the US has not signed up to. Instead, he points to a new website he has set up to track all USAid spending, but he acknowledges it doesn't track other US government departments' aid spend.
He has instituted a big reform of USAid, but perhaps even more influential on policy has been the Arab spring. He admits that it has shaken up how the agency works and who it works with. There needs to be a greater focus on smaller, grassroots organisations instead of larger, well-established institutions; less bureaucracy and fewer rules; more flexibility and risk-taking to back innovation. At the same time, Shah repeats frequently that he wants to show results for every taxpayer dollar spent. It all adds up to a demanding agenda.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/jun/15/rajiv-shah-america-aid

GLOBAL FUND: Mali: Corruption report

Michel D. Kazatchkine : Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
June 6 2011
 
This week, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria released its investigation report on some of our grants in Mali. It is truly sobering to read how a few individuals, who were tasked with managing two malaria and two tuberculosis programs that should save the lives of thousands of their countrymen and -women, instead systematically worked to defraud these programs, stealing $5 million over several years.
The Global Fund is a $21-billion war chest against AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria that has saved more than 6.5 million lives in its nine-year history. Bill Gates described its creation as "one of the best things human beings have done for one another." I find it deeply distressing that people can steal from those who are most in need, and it is hard to understand how the perpetrators can live with themselves. But given that 15 suspects are now in jail awaiting trial, they will, if found guilty, have a lot of time to contemplate why they chose greed over the chance to save lives.
Six months ago, when the Global Fund's own investigations made it clear that money had been lost, we stopped all payments to these grants in Mali -- except for lifesaving drugs -- and demanded that those managing the grants be replaced. Only when new, solid management is in place can we resume transfers of money to these grants. The establishment of new management is well under way.
In this, we are working with the Mali government, and President Amadou Toumani Touré has been the strongest voice for rooting out and cleaning up corruption in his country.
Our investigation also revealed that the Global Fund could have been more vigilant in Mali. But we have learned our lesson. In fact, the Mali case has contributed to the largest reform of grant management at the Global Fund since its inception. We believe that, as a result of these efforts, the Global Fund is now considerably stronger and better prepared to prevent and quickly detect fraud and misuse.
By nature of its mandate, and in order to reach some of the world's most vulnerable populations, the Global Fund works in many countries with governance systems and financial controls that are fragile. In tackling mismanagement, the Global Fund is driven by two core principles: full transparency and zero tolerance for fraud.
The Global Fund stands by full transparency because we believe that our uncompromising attitude to exposing misuse will become a deterrent. People will think twice about stealing from an institution that exposes such thieves publicly. Transparency can be painful, since the world rarely rewards bad news. But as a doctor I know very well that what hurts badly at first will make you stronger. In our case, it will save lives.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michel-d-kazatchkine/transparency-saves-lives_b_871073.html

POVERTY: UN Asia Pacific Chief: Corruption Feeding Poverty, Halting Social Development

Ron Corben : Bangkok May 22, 2011
 Photo: AFP
The UN's executive secretary for the Asia and Pacific Economic and Social Commission, Noeleen Heyzer (file photo)

A senior United Nations official says corruption across Asia is undermining efforts to fight poverty and reduce income disparities. In a wide ranging interview with VOA, Dr. Noeleen Heyzer, the UN’s executive secretary for the Asia and Pacific Economic and Social Commission, said countries must invest in what she called social protection to ensure economic growth in Asia.
“You know the issue is governance. Because at the end of the day you need economic governance. You need better political governance because to be able to have systems that invest in the social foundations of your communities in order that people can have a better life. And obviously any forms of corruption acts against that.”
The Asian Development Bank recently called for improvements in government accountability as “critical” in Asia to maintain social and political stability. It said rising corruption was evident in a “deterioration in the quality and credibility of national political and economic institutions.”
A World Bank Institute report warned of a retreat in accountability and political stability in Asia between 2008 and 2009. In India, for example, the World Bank found only 40 percent of government funds allocated for poverty-related programs actually reached the poor. The remainder, the Bank said, was lost because of bad administration and corruption.
Dr. Heyzer warned that despite recent regional economic gains, widening income disparities needed to be addressed by governments through improved social protection programs.
“What we have seen is that in Asia you have high economic growth but you also have growing inequalities and disparities. And the only way to deal with that is to ensure inclusive growth, to invest in social protection in making sure that for the for the first time this continent can rethink itself and reinvest in itself in terms of taking on the social perspective and dimensions.”
Economic analysts say the Asia Pacific region is an important driver of global growth. But Dr. Heyzer says Asia still faces several challenges to ensure the gains are widely shared.
“Closing the disparity gaps would be critical. How do you sustain growth, but at the same time how do you ensure that this growth is inclusive. We have economic recovery but this recovery is still fragile. There’s going to be major concerns about inflation - there is still a major concern about asset bubbles, capital inflows, and it’s critical to sustain that economic growth.”
In a recently released economic survey UNESCAP forecast Asia Pacific developing economies to grow by more than seven percent for 2011, with China and India expanding at close to nine percent. But the report said inflation remains a concern, due to rising food and energy prices, with the poor especially vulnerable.
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/economy-and-business/UN-Asia-Pacific-Chief-Corruption-Feeding-Poverty-Halting-Social-Development--122411694.html

POVERTY: India’s Anti-Poverty Programs suffer widespread corruption

HEATHER TIMMONS : May 18, 2011
NEW DELHI — India spends more on programs for the poor than most developing countries, but it has failed to eradicate poverty because of widespread corruption and faulty government administration, the World Bank said Wednesday.
“India is not getting the ‘bang for the rupee’ that its significant expenditure would seem to warrant, and the needs of important population groups remain only party addressed,” John D. Blomquist, lead economist at the World Bank, wrote in a nearly 400-page study released Wednesday.
India spent 2 percent of its gross domestic product, or $28.6 billion last year, on social programs to alleviate and prevent poverty, the World Bank said, a higher percentage than any other country in Asia and about three times China’s spending.
The programs, central to the Congress party’s platform, include food distribution and health insurance initiatives that are supposed to reach hundreds of millions of households. The report was written at the “request of the government of India” and with full participation from various government bodies, the report said.
The World Bank on Wednesday recommended a radical overhaul of India’s social programs. “Marginal changes alone may not deliver the kind of safety net which a changing India needs for its poor and for its economy,” Mr. Blomquist wrote.
One of the primary problems, the World Bank said, was “leakages” — an often-used term in development circles that refers to government administrators and middle men stealing money, food and benefits. The bank said that 59 percent of the grain allotted for public distribution to the poor does not reach those households.
Instead of distributing food, the government might be better off giving out food stamps or cash transfers that can be easily traced through technology, the World Bank said.
India, the world’s the second-fastest growing major economy, after China, has had an economic boom in recent years that is transforming urban areas and creating a new class of extremely wealthy people. But social problems, including poverty, disease and illiteracy, remain widespread.
About 455 million Indian citizens live on less than $1.25 a day, the World Bank’s poverty line. A United Nations study released last year found more people living below the poverty threshold in eight states in India than in all of sub- Saharan Africa.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/world/asia/19india.html?_r=1

POVERTY: Evidence is piling up against acquisitions of farmland in poor countries

May 5 2011
THE farmers of Makeni, in central Sierra Leone, signed the contract with their thumbs. In exchange for promises of 2,000 jobs, and reassurances that the bolis (swamps where rice is grown) would not be drained, they approved a deal granting a Swiss company a 50-year lease on 40,000 hectares of land to grow biofuels for Europe. Three years later 50 new jobs exist, irrigation has damaged the bolis and such development as there has been has come “at the social, environmental and economic expense of local communities”, says Elisa Da Vià of Cornell University.

When deals like this first came to international attention in 2009, it was unclear whether they were “land grabs or development opportunities”, to quote a study published that year. Supporters claimed they would bring seeds, technology and capital to some of the world’s poorest lands. Critics, such as the director of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, dubbed them “neo-colonialist”. But no one had hard evidence to back up their claims. Now they do. Two years on, a conference at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) of the University of Sussex, the biggest of its kind so far, examined over 100 land deals. Most judgments are damning.*

Land grabs have been strikingly popular. Preliminary research by the International Land Coalition, a non-governmental organisation, reckons almost 80m hectares have been subject to some sort of negotiation with a foreign investor, more than half in Africa (see chart). This estimate is far higher than a previous one, by the World Bank, which last year said that foreign investors had expressed interest in 57m hectares. It is higher still than one by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) which put the figure in a 2009 study at 15m-20m hectares. It would be wrong to draw a line between these numbers so as to conclude that land deals have grown fourfold. Since most are secret, knowing what to count is difficult, and the figures refer to different periods.



Yet each time someone has looked at the phenomenon, the result has been a figure roughly twice the earlier estimate. It is also clear that the overall scope is vast: 80m hectares is more than the area of farmland of Britain, France, Germany and Italy combined. And land deals are continuing, possibly even speeding up. Over a tenth of the farmland of South Sudan has been leased this year—even before the country has formally got its independence. GRAIN, an advocacy group, says it has seen proposals that would allow Saudi business groups to take control of 70% of the rice-growing area of Senegal.
It is not just the size of land deals that remains uncertain. Their contractual basis often is, too. Few contracts have been made public, so details are sketchy. But an investigation of 12 that have been, by Lorenzo Cotula of the International Institute for Environment and Development, declares many “not to be fit for purpose”. The rights and obligations of each side, Mr Cotula says, are usually extremely vague, while traditional land-use rights are frequently ignored. As one farmer asked when a British company acquired forestry rights in Tanzania: “How come others are selling our land?”
Even after the contract is signed, there is no guarantee a land deal will go ahead in accordance with it. A survey by the World Bank† showed that in the Amhara region of Ethiopia, only 16 of 46 projects were working as intended (the rest lay fallow or had been rented back to smallholders). In Mozambique only half the projects were working as planned.
Still, some conclusions seem warranted. When land deals were first proposed, they were said to offer the host countries four main benefits: more jobs, new technology, better infrastructure and extra tax revenues. None of these promises has been fulfilled.
Locals usually regard jobs as the most important of these. But so far they have been scarce, and only partly because many projects are not yet up and running. In Mozambique, the World Bank found, one project had promised 2,650 jobs and created a mere 35-40 full-time positions. A survey by Thea Hilhorst of 99 smaller projects in Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger reported “hardly any” rural job creation. Only one of the publicly available contracts studied by Mr Cotula even specifies a number of new jobs to be created. And when there are jobs, foreign investors often bring in outsiders to staff them, leading to “conflict or accusations of cheating”, according to the World Bank. The manager of one project was killed during an argument about jobs.
Evidence of the transfer of technology and skills is mixed. Ms Hilhorst found almost no impetus towards greater professionalism in farming, although she concedes that closer links with food processors and distributors might improve matters. The World Bank’s study argued that technological improvements in Ukraine and Mexico had helped reduce rural out-migration (though this was surprising: you might have expected new labour-saving technologies to encourage underemployed farmers to leave the land). Mr Cotula’s study of land-deal contracts found few examples in which the foreign investor was obliged to exchange materials or ideas with local farmers. At the moment, land-grabbing foreigners seem to be creating islands for themselves, cut off from the poverty-stricken countryside.

Grabbing sans giving
Some projects’ operators have done better in building new schools, clinics and other “social infrastructure”. Madagascar may be a surprising example as it witnessed what is perhaps the most notorious land grab of all: a South Korean company was offered half the country’s arable land—a proposal that fuelled protests which eventually toppled the government who approved the deal. Two years later Perrine Burnod of CIRAD, a French research organisation, found that the number of land deals on the island had fallen by two-thirds. And those that remained had begun to look more like aid projects, with investors committing themselves to building schools and clinics. Local mayors were welcoming them in to help finance projects no longer supported by the cash-strapped central government.
Yet this is atypical. Most land deals contribute little or nothing to the public purse. Because markets for land are so ill-developed in Africa and governments so weak, rents are piffling: $2 per hectare per year in Ethiopia; $5 in Liberia. Tax and rent holidays are common. Indeed, it is not unusual for foreign investors to pay less tax than local smallholders. And upfront compensation to local farmers for use of their land is derisory: often just a few months of income for agreeing to a 100-year lease.
“The risks associated with such investments are immense,” concludes the World Bank. “In many cases public institutions were unable to cope with the surge in demand…Land acquisitions often deprived local people, in particular the vulnerable, of their rights…Consultations, if conducted at all, were superficial…and environmental and social safeguards were widely neglected.”
So why are land deals popular? That is surprisingly easy to answer: strong demand and willing suppliers. The big investors tend to be capital-exporting countries with large worries about feeding their own people. Their confidence in world markets has been shaken by two food-price spikes in four years. So they have sought to guarantee food supplies by buying farmland abroad. China is by far the largest investor, buying or leasing twice as much as anyone else.
Local elites have also played a vital role in spreading land deals. In a Tanzanian project described by Martina Locher of the University of Zurich, “local people who refer to customary law have a very low level of knowledge [and cannot] defend their land rights.” In contrast, she writes, “state law is mainly represented by district officials, who…enjoy a high level of respect by local people.”
Then there is corruption. Many of the west African “land grabbers” described by Ms Hilhorst are local politicians, civil servants and other urban elites who bribe local chiefs with gifts of motorbikes. Madeleine Fairbairn of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, argues that in Mozambique, an informal division of the spoils has emerged. Local bigwigs use their influence to get “facilitation fees”, while national leaders manipulate the law and promote (or obstruct) projects to their own and their supporters’ advantage.
Many development projects work this way. What makes land grabs unusual is their combination of high levels of corruption with low levels of benefit. Ruth Meinzen-Dick, one of the authors of the IFPRI study, says that in 2009 the balance of costs and benefits was genuinely unclear. Now, she argues, the burden of evidence has shifted and it is up to the proponents of land deals to show that they work. At the moment, they have precious few examples to point to.
http://www.economist.com/node/18648855?story_id=18648855

POVERTY: India: Not getting "bang for rupee" from poverty schemes

May 18, 2011: Henry Foy
(Editing by Matthias Williams and Alex Richardson)



A homeless woman prepares food on a roadside in Ahmedabad : Credit: Reuters/Amit Dave/Files

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's key social development programmes, which have formed the core election promises of the ruling Congress party at a cost of over 2 percent of its GDP, are failing to effectively tackle widespread poverty, a World Bank report said on Wednesday.
The government's schemes to distribute food and guarantee work in rural areas suffer from poor implementation, red tape and corruption, the report said, common ailments that worry investors in Asia's third-largest economy.
Congress has trumpeted costly welfare schemes to lift hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty and share the spoils of years of economic boom, propelling it to two successive victories in federal elections.
Though home to 69 billionaires, the country has more people living in poverty than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.
While the Bank commended specific innovations and the impact of schemes in some states, it warned that welfare schemes were yet to make significant progress in helping up to 500 million people living below the poverty line in India.
"While India devotes over 2 percent of GDP to her social protection programmes... the poor are not able to reap the full benefits of such large investments," the report stated.
"India is not getting the 'bang for the rupee' that its significant expenditure would seem to warrant."
Costly social sector spending will likely make it difficult for the government to meet its fiscal deficit target of 4.6 percent of GDP in the fiscal year ending March 2012.
A decade of booming economic growth has pulled millions out of poverty, but its failure to provide for its 1.2 billion population means it lags other developing nations, such as China, in key development indicators.
The programmes assessed by the report have been praised for driving growth in rural areas, which rely heavily on agriculture and were largely bypassed by the mostly urban-centric economic boom that has swollen the middle class.
The impact of the Public Distribution System, which spends up to 1 percent of GDP on providing food to the poor, is limited, with leakage and diversion of stocks through corruption resulting in only 41 percent of grains reaching poor households.
The Congress party-led coalition's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREG), to provide poor households with work, is undermined by payment delays and administration errors, and fails to promote social mobility.
"Studies suggest the ability of MGNREG to be promotional has started but has not reached its potential," said John Blomquist, the report's author.
"For the most part, it has been much more of a reactionary programme for existing poverty, and has a way to go."
http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/05/18/idINIndia-57103420110518

POVERTY: Nigeria: Poverty Eradication through Agriculture and Enterprise Revolution

May 1st, 2011 : Peter Osalor

The story of Nigerian agriculture is best read between the lines of its political history. Africa’s most populous nation had an overwhelmingly agricultural economy during the hundred years spent under British colonial rule since 1860, and well into the first decade after its independence.
In the 1960s Nigeria was the world’s second largest producer of cocoa, the largest exporter of palm oil and a principal producer and exporter of cotton, rubber and groundnut. Working traditional tools and practices, Nigerian peasants contributed 70% of export revenue and 60% of GDP in the same period. The total food requirement was met almost entirely by local produce and agricultural imports were to the bare minimum.
Circumstances changed radically with the oil boom of the 1970s, as the discovery of vast oil and gas reserves in the strategically significant sub-Saharan nation turned its fortunes overnight.
The windfall transformed Nigeria’s agricultural landscape into a gigantic oil field criss-crossed by more than 7,000 km of pipelines connecting 6,000 oil wells, two refineries, innumerable flow stations and export terminals. The colossal investments in the sector paid off, with unofficial estimates suggesting Nigeria raked in more than $600 billion in petrodollars in the last decade alone.
Unfortunately, the obsession with non-renewables over all other sectors of the economy eventually turned Nigeria’s boon into a bane. New found wealth spawned political instability and massive corruption in government circles, and the country was rent asunder by decades of violent civil war and successive military coups.
Agriculture was one of the first casualties of the oil regime, and by the 1990s, cultivation accounted for just 5% of GDP. Farming modernisation and support continued to remain low on the list of national priorities as vast stretches of rural Nigeria gradually plunged into poverty and food scarcity. Deforestation, soil erosion and industrial pollution further hastened the down-spiral of agriculture to the point where it ended up as a subsistence activity.
The fall of Nigerian agriculture coincided with the collapse of its macroeconomic and human development indicators. With income distribution concentrated on a few urban pockets, the majority of rural Nigeria was left reeling under massive poverty, unemployment and food shortages. A widening urban-rural divide sparked social unrest and mass migration into towns and cities.
Organised urban crime became as real a security threat as militancy in the Niger-Delta region. Nigeria plummeted to the bottom in world economic rankings and Africa’s most populous nation acquired the unhappy distinction of having more than half (54%) of its 148 million people living in abject poverty. The World Bank coined the term “Nigerian Paradox” specifically to describe the unique condition of extreme underdevelopment and poverty in a country brimming with resources and potential.
The country was ranked 80th in a 2007 UNDP poverty survey covering 108 countries.
The transition to democratic civilian rule at the end of the last century paved the way for an enthusiastic programme of economic reform and restructuring. Nigeria’s urgency for inclusive growth was much in evidence in the adoption of an ambitious blueprint designed to reverse trends and jump-start a stagnating economy.
The Vision 20-2020 document adopted under former president Olusegun Obasanjo lays out broad parameters for sustainable development with the specific goal of instating Nigeria as a global economic superpower in a time_bound manner.
The 2020 goals are in addition to Nigeria’s commitment to the UN Millennial Declaration of 2000 that proposes universal basic human rights by 2015.
The realisation of these allied and intertwined objectives depends entirely on Nigeria’s ability to bring about inclusive growth by means of an entrepreneurial revolution, while simultaneously correcting massive infrastructural shortages and administrative anomalies.
Economies usually begin expanding with an initial agricultural revolution: The case of Nigeria however calls for agriculture to be part of a larger enterprise revolution that efficiently leverages the nation’s extensive resources and human capital.
http://www.thenigeriandaily.com/2011/05/01/poverty-eradication-in-nigeria-through-agriculture-and-enterprise-revolution-part-1/

MALNUTRITION: Poverty in plenty

Abdul Bayes: Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University. He can be reached at e-mail: abdulbayeseyahoo.com

THE aim of all developmental drives, in Bangladesh and beyond, is to reduce hunger and malnutrition that afflict a vast number of people. Hunger, a general term related to not getting enough to eat, is possibly the worst form of capability deprivation. In fact, it is a denial to development and freedom.
Disconcertingly, however, the twenty-first century dawned with some disappointing disarray allegedly ascribed 'dirty developments'. In a world that takes a pride in plenty, prosperity and progress, millions of people remain chronically undernourished and food insecure; a little over billion live on the equivalent of less than a dollar per day. It's not very difficult to grasp the gruesome gravity of the pitiful position: many people don't have enough to eat to keep them on an even keel. That means that they are in a state of hunger - chronic or transitory.
The ugly face of the discordance between wealth of the few and the woes of the millions is unveiled by an eminent economist named Kausik Basu. Leafing through Forbes magazine and some World Development Reports, he contends that total income (in 1998) of Hollywood's richest 50 individuals would exceed the total income of Burundi's entire population of 7 million. If Bill Gates -- supposedly spearheaded by a spending-spree -- decided to encash and consume the increase in the value of his total assets that he reaped over the past year, he would be able to consume more than the total annual consumption of the 60 million people of Ethiopia. "These numbers reflect both the phenomenal scope for wealth and economic well-being that the modern world makes possible and also how easy it is for this enormous potential to bypass large masses of humanity". But have things changed since Basu exposed the dark side of development? Possibly it has not changed. The world is getting wealthier when, allegedly, woes of the millions are mounting.
A priori, the perception was that inequality would wane, if not wiped out, through spill-over or "trickle down" effects during the process of growth and accumulation. In other words, Nobel laureate Simon Kuznet's hypothesis would work where initial phases of growth would witness rising inequality and later phases would observe a reduction in inequality. But that didn't seem to have happened in many countries. To corroborate the concern, the state of 'poverty in plenty' can be highlighted through the following frightening facts:
* About 925 million don't have enough to eat - more than the population of the USA, Canada, and European Union;
* Ninety eight per cent of world's hungry live in developing countries - 65 per cent living only in seven countries: India, China, DRP Congo, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Ethiopia;
* Women make up a little over half of the world's population but they account for 60 per cent of world's hungry;
* A malnourished child dies every seven seconds; and
* The cost of under-nutrition to national economic development is estimated at US $20-30 billion per annum.
Thus, the failure to fight against hunger may turn out to be a holocaust. If allowed to go unabated, the "have-nots" might swell the society to make hell the lives of the 'Haves' -- a message that abounds history. Hunger hurts the whole society, not the hungry ones alone. The sooner we feel it, the better it is.
As far as Bangladesh is concerned, it can possibly boast of a rising economic growth rate approximating 7.0 per cent per annum. Paripassu the growth, the incidence of income poverty has gone down by a little over 1.0 per cent per year during the last decades, It is estimated that poverty level now stands at 44 per cent in rural areas compared to 60 per cent in the past. It is further found that six - as against 15 in early periods - in each 100 rural households can not meet three satisfactory meals a day. Roughly two-thirds of households do not have access to electricity. Infant and maternal mortality rates have fallen over time but Bangladesh is a country with one of the highest mortality rates in the world. The inequality of income, as reflected by gini co-efficient, has been rising to reach 0.47 to indicate growing inequality of income or unequal distribution of the growth-pie. The bottom 20 per cent has been losing the share in income while the top 10 per cent had been increasing the share.
The principal causes of inequality in the society are loan defaults, rising land prices and corruption. Corruption - mostly bribes and kickbacks - is said to have claimed roughly 2.0 per cent of GDP every year. There are other faces of corruption. Over-and under-invoicing of imports and exports have caused huge amount of foreign exchange to fly out of the country. Just think of the massive amount of money amassed through corruption or collusion in the share market. More painfully, few of them are alleged to be close with policy- makers. Thus, to see a poverty-free Bangladesh means seeing a corruption-free society. The war against poverty is the war against corruption.
Inequality and poverty in the economy cannot be reduced only through adhoc measures like subsidies, rebates, doles etc. It needs a structural change in the operation of the institutions - a matter of deep political commitment -through which people translate their assets into incomes. For example, it requires reforms of the markets and judiciary - two of the institutions that serve the poor. If small investors go broke due to the manipulations in the share market, and the sharks are shielded despite violation, it means weak institutions cause inequality and poverty. Inequality is inevitable with economic growth but the degree of inequality could be controlled via raising the elasticity of poverty reduction with respect to growth. The elasticity coefficient is very low in Bangladesh, say less than 0.60, compared to a rate of more than 2.0 in other countries such as Vietnam. It means, a 1.0 per cent increase in economic growth in Bangladesh reduces poverty by much less than 1.0 per cent, while the same 1.0 per cent increases in economic growth in Vietnam more than doubles poverty reduction.
Thus, the poor must have participation in the process of economic growth. Massive exploration of mining may increase growth at the cost of widening inequality in the society but massive growth in agriculture may result in growth with fair distribution. Agricultural growth, labor intensive manufacturing, widely distributed non-discriminatory quality education, reduction of digital disparity etc., could meet both ends: more pleasure, less pains. There is no pleasure in plenty unless we can reduce the pains of poverty in the society.
http://www.thefinancialexpress-bd.com/more.php?news_id=133718&date

GLOBAL FUND and corruption charges

April 22, 2011 : Alanna Shaikh
The Associated Press ran another senseless gotcha article about the Global Fund to Fight AIDS Tuberculosis, and Malaria. Once again, they are reporting on an investigation performed by the Global Fund’s own Inspector General. Once again, they’re writing as though this is 1) extremely shocking and 2) somehow the result of investigative reporting by the AP. Neither of these things are true.
To recap, in January, the AP ran an article full of shock, horror, and exaggerations at the discovery that the Global Fund’s internal processes had uncovered corruption. The lede went like this “A $21.7 billion development fund backed by celebrities and hailed as an alternative to the bureaucracy of the United Nations sees as much as two-thirds of some grants eaten up by corruption…” The dauntless Humanosphere blog calculated that the lost funds amounted to approximately 0.3% of all grant funding. And then everyone from the Global Fund itself to experts at the Center for Global Development weighed in to point out that the global fund’s investigators uncovered and reported the fraud themselves, and that .3% of funds is about the same as every major global effort loses to fraud.
Fast forward to this week. The AP runs an article full of shock, horror, and exaggeration at the discovery that the Global Fund’s internal investigators have uncovered corruption. This time, the lede looks like this: “A global health fund believes millions of dollars’ worth of its donated malaria drugs have been stolen in recent years. In internal documents leaked to the Associated Press, officials from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria – backed by big names including the singer Bono and Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft…”
Global Fund spokesperson Jon Liden points out that $1-2.5 million worth of malaria drugs have gone missing, out of approximately $100 million of malaria drugs provided by the Global Fund. The drugs thefts came to light because of the Global Fund’s new focus on fighting corruption, and are in fact part of the corruption that was mentioned in the January report.
I have to admit, I don’t get it. Why is the AP harping on this? Yes, corruption is bad. Because it’s bad, it seems to me that it’s a good thing when a major global donor launches an effort to root out corruption. This is the kind of behavior we should encourage, not punish. And is “backed by celebrities” the only useful thing they have to say about the Global Fund? There is no other way they can describe the largest effort in the world to reduce deaths from our three biggest pandemics?
Look, I hate corruption as much as the next person. Possibly more, since I see its impact every day in my work. But if the AP thinks this is the way to get rid of it, they’re weirdly mistaken. It seems more like they want to get rid of the Global Fund itself.
http://www.undispatch.com/what-is-the-aps-grudge-against-the-global-fund

MALARIA: Anti-malaria drugs worth millions of dollars stolen from global health charity

20 April 2011


Anti-malaria drugs worth millions of dollars stolen from global health charity Thirteen countries identified, mostly in Africa, where drugs have been sold on the black market
A global health fund believes millions of dollars' worth of its donated malaria drugs have been stolen in recent years. In internal documents leaked to the Associated Press, officials from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria – backed by big names including the singer Bono and Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, and hailed as an alternative to UN bureaucracy – identified 13 countries, mostly in Africa, where drugs have gone missing. Spokesman Jon Liden confirmed the fund suspects malaria drugs worth $2.5m were stolen, mainly from 2009 to 2011. He said investigations were under way to determine how much was stolen elsewhere. "We take this very seriously and we will do what it takes to protect our investment," he said.
An AP report in January exposed high rates of misappropriated money in some Global Fund grants and bruised the reputation of the multibillion-dollar fund.
But the fact that these revelations have come to light at all may be due to stricter self-policing and greater transparency at the Global Fund, compared with other aid organisations.
Malaria infects more than 250 million people every year, killing about a million, the vast majority of whom are children in Africa. Because there is a huge demand for malaria drugs, which are widely available at pharmacies and on private markets, they are easier to sell than drugs for other diseases such as Aids, which are mainly handed out at health clinics.
After discovering the scope of the malaria drug thefts, the new Global Fund documents indicate the fund took prompt action, suspending grants for medicines to be stored at government warehouses in Swaziland and Malawi.
Other than the drugs confirmed stolen in Togo, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Swaziland and Cambodia, specific dollar figures were not available for the other nine countries, all in Africa and including Nigeria and Kenya, where the Global Fund has large programmes.
The fund singled out a $200m contract for malaria drugs in Tanzania in which it suspects theft took place. It listed the theft at more than $1m but said: "The potential cost of the misappropriation is not yet quantified." In Togo, the fund reported $850,000 worth of drugs disappeared in 2008 in a case of "insider stealing".
The audits that the AP wrote about in January suggested that tens of thousands of dollars worth of malaria drugs are stolen every year.
The Global Fund's inspector general said in a report to its board of directors late last year that it was beginning to investigate allegations of "organised theft of anti-malarial drugs" in African countries, after discovering that drugs were ending up on store shelves in African countries instead of going to the intended recipients for free.
The new documents obtained by the AP – which are the results of that investigation – show that in about 70% of cases, the drugs were stolen at government-operated warehouses by security personnel, warehouse managers and doctors.
"The cases show that drug misappropriations are well organised and predominantly planned by insiders using falsified documents," one of the reports said. The documents also state that pilfered drugs were being shipped to other countries for resale, often within hours of their arrival.
Officials wrote that there was a "parallel market for the sale of Global Fund-procured drugs" and that many other investigations on alleged thefts in other countries were under way.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/20/malaria-drugs-stolen-africa

MALNUTRITION: India: Many eat poorly. Would a “right to food” help?

March 31st 2011

“LOOK at this muck,” says 35-year-old Pamlesh Yadav, holding up a tin-plate of bilious-yellow grains, a mixture of wheat, rice and mung beans. “It literally sticks in the throat. The children won’t eat it, so we take it home and feed it to the cows.”



Mrs Yadav has brought her children to a state-run nursery in Bhindusi village in rural Rajasthan. The free midday meal is being dished out. Neither she nor anyone else in Bhindusi looks plump enough to turn down such an offer. Stray dogs scamper through the nursery and toddlers are being weighed in the corner while food is passed around. Most are underweight. Mrs Yadav herself is anaemic, like almost all local women; she survives on potato curry and wheat chapatis. Even so, she rejects a free lunch. “The only reason the women come here is because of the creche,” admits Shafia Khan, who is in charge of state nurseries in the district. “The children don’t like the food. And the ones you see here are the lucky ones. Out in the fields, it is terrible. Everyone is listless; they all suffer from vitamin and iron deficiencies.”



The nursery is part of India’s Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS), the largest child-nutrition programme in the world. Its woes in Rajasthan are part of a larger problem. India is an outlier. Its rate of malnutrition—nearly half the children under three weigh less than they should—is much higher than it should be given India’s level of income. And the burden has shifted more slowly than it ought to have done given Indian growth. Lawrence Haddad, the director of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University, reckons that every 3-4% increase in a developing country’s income per head should translate into a 1% fall in rates of underweight children. In India the rate has barely shifted in two decades of growth. Per person, India eats less, and worse, than it used to. Mr Haddad calls the country the world’s Jekyll and Hyde: economic powerhouse, nutritional weakling. Over a third of the world’s malnourished children live there.
When India was poor, its failure to feed itself properly did not seem odd. Poverty was explanation enough. But after one of the most impressive growth spurts in history, the country’s inability to lift the curse of malnutrition has emerged as its greatest failure—and biggest puzzle. Nothing fully accounts for it. True, farming has not shared in the same dazzling success as the rest of the economy, lately rising by only a point or two per person per year. But some African countries have seen farm output per head actually fall—and they have still cut malnutrition more than India.
It is also true that India’s food bureaucracy is a byword for inefficiency and corruption. People steal from the cheap-food shops of the Public Distribution System (PDS) on an industrial scale. Newspapers call a case of theft now under investigation in Uttar Pradesh “the mother of all scams”. At one point, the country’s top investigative agency said it had given up even trying to cope with the 50,000 separate charges. But again, other countries have corrupt bureaucracies, too—or none, which may be as bad.
So the most convincing explanations for India’s nutritional failures probably lie elsewhere. Women are the most important influences upon their children’s health—and the status of women in India is notoriously low. Brides are deemed to join their husband’s family on marriage and are often treated as unpaid skivvies. “The mothers aren’t allowed to look after themselves,” says Mrs Khan. “Their job is simply to have healthy babies.” But if mothers are unhealthy, their children frequently are, too.
India is also riven by caste and tribal divisions. It is no coincidence that states with the most dalits (former untouchables) or tribes (such as Bihar and Orissa) have higher malnutrition rates than those, like Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, with fewer of these excluded groups. So-called scheduled castes and tribes are more likely than other Indians to suffer the ills of poor diet.
But that cannot be the whole story. Astonishingly, a third of the wealthiest 20% of Indian children are malnourished, too, and they are neither poor nor excluded. Bad practice plays some part—notably a reluctance to breastfeed babies. There may also be an element of choice. Long ago, a study in Maharashtra showed that people spend only two-thirds of their extra income on food—and this is true whether they are middle-income or dirt-poor. That may seem perverse. But a mobile phone may be more useful to the poor than better food, since the phone may generate income during the next harvest failure, and good food will not.

Wanted: Bolsa India
These explanations matter because they raise questions about the Indian government’s current attempt to offer a universal “right to food”. Over the past 20 years, the supreme court has said that Indians have various social rights (to work, education and so on) and can sue the government if they are not honoured. The free school-meal programme was an attempt to implement a right to food. Now the government wants to go further. It is talking about giving cheap food to about 90% of country-dwellers and 50% of city folk—three-quarters of all Indians.
Leave aside the budgetary implications, which are awe-inspiring. Such a programme would hugely expand the terminally dysfunctional PDS. It would do little or nothing for neglected castes and tribes. It would not raise the status of women, or encourage breastfeeding and early nutrition. (As Mrs Khan says, “the crucial time is between the ages of nought and three, but we’re not really reaching them.”) Giving cash, rather than food itself, would be better. Better still, India should look to international experience and introduce a conditional cash-transfer scheme, such as Brazil’s Bolsa Família, which pays the mother if her children attend school. India hankers after “universal” benefits that would leave millions malnourished. It should instead learn from schemes that target those who need help—and which actually work.
http://www.economist.com/node/18485871?story_id=18485871&fsrc=rss

POVERTY: The Global Corruption Index, in graphic form

Back in October, Transparency International released their latest Global Corruption Index. A great new info-graphic about the index has been put together by Graphic-is and it summaries the report quite well. The info-graphic displays a map of the world to show the results of the survey on a color scale. The winners of the survey have the deepest shades of green while the losers have the deepest shades of red. The graphic also shows the most corrupt systems according to respondents with Political Parties leading the way.
Corruption is important when talking about poverty because the greater the corruption the more barriers exist for poor people to move up the economic ladder. When people live in a country where they have to continually pay bribes to police or other government officials it is impossible to get ahead.


 
http://povertynewsblog.blogspot.com/search/label/global%20corruption%20index

POVERTY: UK aid budget refocuses 'on areas of greatest need'

 Nicholas Watt, chief political correspondent guardian.co.uk,  27 February 2011
UK aid budget refocuses 'on areas of greatest need', including YemenEnd of aid to Russia, Serbia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Moldova, as poorer or failing nations prioritised

Britain is to stop sending aid to a series of relatively affluent developing countries as the government focuses resources on countries with the highest levels of poverty, and failing states that have become havens for Islamist fundamentalists.
A review of Britain's £8.4bn international development budget will herald the end of aid to Russia, Serbia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam and Moldova.
Aid to Yemen, regarded by Britain as a failing state whose lack of economic development provides a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaida, will instead be doubled from £46.7m this year to £90m by 2015.
The changes will be announced by Andrew Mitchell, the international development secretary, who established separate reviews into Britain's bilateral and multilateral aid budgets after the general election.
The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) could be a victim of the review of Britain's support for multilateral organisations. Unesco, which was boycotted by Britain for 12 years between 1985 and 1997 on the grounds that it was "pro-Soviet", will have to meet a series of targets to justify its aid after the review found that it wasted the £12m it receives from Britain each year.
Mitchell told the BBC Politics Show that the reviews would lead to Britain's aid budget being "much better focused" on areas of greatest need. "People who live in conflict states are very much part of that," he said.
The reviews are designed to answer opponents on the right and left who have criticised the government's approach to aid from different angles.
A focus on developing countries in greatest need, with a hard-headed payments by results system, is meant to show sceptical Tories that the aid budget is being spent in a sensible way. Many Tories believe it was wrong of David Cameron to ringfence the aid budget, after the prime minister pledged to maintain Britain's commitment to meet the UN target of spending 0.7% of gross national income on aid by 2013.
Targeting resources at a country such as Yemen, some of whose territory is used by al-Qaida as a training ground, is also designed to show that concerns on the left about the securitisation of Britain's aid budget are unfounded.
Charities have warned that aligning aid priorities with Britain's overall foreign and trade policy could lead to a return to the 1990s when the Pergau dam in Indonesia was funded with British aid money. Harriet Harman, the shadow international development secretary, voiced these fears when she warned of "subsuming aid activities into military activities".
Mitchell said it was in Britain's interests to help countries which present a threat. "It's very much in our national interest to tackle these effects of dysfunctionality and poverty, such as piracy, migration, terrorism and disease in Somalia," he told the Sunday Times. "Tackling the causes of poverty upstream is much less expensive than sending in troops."
Mitchell also tackled one of the main criticisms from the right, that it is wrong to provide aid to India, whose economy is growing at such a fast pace that Delhi can afford a space programme. "The fact is that if you want to reach these [UN] millennium development goals, which we are also keen to do by 2015, you have to operate where poverty is greatest," he told the Politics Show. "In India there are more poor people in three states than there are in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Operating there in the way that we do is extremely effective in poverty alleviation."

The reviews, which have been subject to independent peer review, will have four main themes:
• A complete overhaul of the way in which Britain distributes aid. Mitchell believes that Gordon Brown announced an overall figure for a grant to a particular country without working out what exactly that would deliver. "Now it is going to be payment by results, so money will only be granted if it is clear how many more children will be educated in a given country and how much clean water will be supplied, for example," one source said.
• Independent evaluation. A four-strong independent panel, including the Kenyan anti-corruption expert John Githongo, will monitor aid spending. The panel will report to parliament.
• Britain has a moral duty to help those in need in line with its values. Mitchell frequently quotes the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce to support the aid cause. "You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again you did not know," Wilberforce said.
• It is in Britain's own national interests to help countries which present a threat, however indirectly.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2011/feb/27/uk-aid-budget-andrew-mitchell

MALNUTRITION: Poor governance, corruption driving malnutrition and hunger in South Asia

21 February 2011
The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) has revealed that poor governance and corruption in major South Asian nations- India, Bangladesh and Nepal- is leading to widespread hunger in the regions. ALRC highlights that the three countries have failed to ensure the citizen’s right to food and record amongst the highest child malnutrition and maternal mortality rates in Asia.
he Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC) wishes to highlight failures by the Bangladeshi, Indian and Nepalese governments in ensuring their citizen's right to food. All three are State Parties to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which guarantees the right to food as a fundamental right under article 11, but also have amongst the highest rates of child malnutrition and maternal mortality in Asia. These governments are depriving vulnerable groups from accessing resources, land and food; in particular landless Dalits (low caste communities in South Asia) and indigenous groups.

India
The Prime Minister announced in 2010 that the child malnutrition and starvation was not acceptable. However, the government has not given priority to food security and in fact contributes to many of the causes of widespread hunger. The National Food Security Act drafted in January 2011 fails to cover all of the poor in rural areas and introduces a weak mechanism for punishment of corrupt officials, which has been the root cause of the failure of the enforcement of various previous policies and programs related to the right to food for the poor. Rotten food grains found in several states in 2010, that should have been delivered to the poor, shows that poor governance is another important aspect that contributes to the government's failure to fulfill the right to food.
Child malnutrition cases documented in Madhya Pradesh expose the lack of government systems to ensure redress and lack of political will to ensure food self-sufficiency for the poor. In districts such as Sahariya, Rewa, Satna, Jhabua and Khandwa, more than 60% of the children are undernourished, and around 20 percent face severe acute malnutrition. High levels of child malnutrition have persisted for years here. Communities facing child malnutrition belong to tribes or Dalits confronting discrimination and corruption. The government's responses has been pitiful, and do not address the main causes of child malnutrition, instead often resorting to denial about the fact that malnutrition is behind the deaths of children. Emergency distribution measures typically fail to reach many malnourished children and the State is failing to put in place community-based health care systems that could prevent the recurrence of such emergencies.
Farmers are being forced to cultivate ever-smaller areas of land or even evicted from their land completely, engendering poverty and hunger. The government and third parties are taking over natural resources, including land, in the name of development' leading to scarcity of food. Poor villagers are being excluded from decision-making process and do not get any benefits from development projects, in violation of domestic laws.
Chutka village, located in Mandla district, Madhya Pradesh, is one of 38 villages predominantly occupied by tribes, where the government and the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited have been planning to establish a power plant since 1984. The villagers had previously been displaced during the building of the Bargi dam and now face displacement once again. The villagers were supposed to be provided with electricity following the building of the dam but this has not happened. Some could afford to buy agricultural land in other areas with the compensation provided, however they got much less land than before due to rising land prices.
The recent decision by the Indian Ministry of the Environment and Forests allowing Korean subsidiary Pohang Steel Company (POSCO)'s steel plant, mining and port project, launched in Orissa, also presents a number of problems including concerning the right to food. In the land acquisition process, over 40,000 villagers were completely excluded from their land and many were also assaulted by the police during a peaceful protest in May 2010. The decision to allow the project to go ahead went against the advice of four out of five committees formed by the Ministry of Environment and Forests. These committees suggested the withdrawal of the project due to its serious impact upon environment and violations of law tribal lands and livelihood. The Ministry chose to go with the recommendation of the one committee that gave the plan a positive response. In addition, the Ministry accepted the statement by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs concerning a land claim by the tribes in the affected areas, which stated that there was no land claim from six villages. This has led to criticism of both ministries.

Nepal
Nepal currently stands at a crossroads in its history and has the opportunity to create new policies and laws, and implement an effective system to guarantee the right to food for all, in particular the most vulnerable groups, such as Dalits and indigenous groups. Key policies concerning land redistribution, construction of infrastructure and food distribution have not been effective to date. Cases documented suggest that the main causes for this are discrimination against Dalits and indigenous groups, and non-transparency and corruption in enforcing policies and laws.
The Lands Act and other laws related to land and agrarian reform have been launched since the early 1960s, but the government has failed to implement them in practice. The government has instead succeeded in nationalizing forestlands that were home to indigenous people, depriving them of the resources that they have been depending on for generations. This has been accompanied by failed land redistribution to the landless. Official data shows that 30 percent of Nepal's rural population are landless, most of whom are Dalits who live in extreme poverty and starvation, whereas 54 percent are tenants on the land. 'Untouchability' has been abolished by law, but remains deeply rooted in a society and the main obstacle in implementing laws and policies aiming at guaranteeing the right to food to vulnerable groups.
The Gandharva community, which numbers 21,000 individuals, is one such Dalit communities facing chronic hunger. 70 percent of the Gandharva are landless. Some have settled along the Manahara river bank in Bardiya district, with only 0.08 acres having been allotted to each household by the government in 1993.
The villagers could build houses but struggle to cultivate food on this land. Women are forced to migrate to the Gulf countries as domestic workers and face many serious violations of their rights there, whereas the men migrate to neighbouring countries, as they cannot get jobs due to caste-based discrimination at home. Their wages are not sufficient to support their families, leading to a lack of nutrition and serious health issues, including paralysis amongst their children. Safe drinking water is not available, affecting food safety and health.
The government budget for 2008-9 enabled the establishment of a High Level Scientific Land Reform Commission in order to abolish feudal land ownership. As with many other human rights issues during the current period of political logjam in the country, the government has yet to adopt the recommendations made by the Commission. The 2010-11 budget targets food insecurity zones in Karnali and Mahakali, located in the far western area of Nepal but nothing has happened as yet. Villagers there go through food scarcity every year from February to June. The land is not productive enough to enable self-sufficiency. Earlier, they could cultivate medical plants and apples to get food by trade. However, the government has since blocked the trade route without providing alternatives for their livelihood, leading to starvation and suicides.
In 2010, villagers in Karnali again suffered from hunger during the traditional festival in October, since the government failed to provide subsidized food in time. The price of rice subsidized by the government and delivered by the National Food Corporative is 1.5-2 times higher than in Kathmandu (at 80 Nepali rupees per kilogram) due to transportation difficulties, for which the poor villagers have to pay. The 2010-11 budget earmarked for infrastructure in Karnali has not materialised. The government has also failed to identify the poorest in the regions and instead distributes rice on a first-come-first-served basis. It is more difficult for the poorest, Dalits and the villagers living in the most remote districts, such as Karnali-Jumla, Humla, Kalikot, Mugu and Jumla, to reach towns where rice is disseminated. Dalits often have to wait for all non-Dalits villagers to have collected rice first, resulting in them often returning home without food.

Bangladesh
Bangladesh announced in its official statement on the budget for 2009-10 that the State was self-sufficient in terms of food production. The government, however, violates the right to food of vulnerable groups such as landless farmers, indigenous groups, minorities and women. Paddy farmers account for 69% of the population are the largest occupational sector in country, but many of them are landless and face child malnutrition and food insecurity. For some five months before and after harvest season each year, villagers do not have work and floods or droughts seriously affect cultivation, in particular in Northern Bangladesh.
Mr. Md. Rafiqul Islam has been living without sufficient resources in Gaibandha district, Northern Bangladesh, which is officially known to be the most vulnerable area in terms of food security. He is paid around 80-120 BDT (1.12-1.68 USD) per day for agricultural work only during the working season. The government has yet to set up a minimum wage. The price of staple rice has increased, and is now at around 35-40 BDT per kilogram in this area. His two sons and daughter face a lack of nutrition and his daughter is even deprived of the right to an education. The mostly landless elderly in the district also face a lack of food and healthcare. Cases documented in the district show that corrupt officials do not allow them to enjoy government food distribution and other policies and programs unless they pay bribes.
The budget for basic healthcare facilities has not been sufficiently allocated. Community clinics suffer from a lack of medicine. Social security programs targeting the elderly do not function effectively. Rafiqul's family does not enjoy any support from the government and has to pay bribes to officials and public representatives. Those who can afford to pay bribes often get the benefits although they are not eligible for them. Corruption is amongst the biggest obstacles that hampers food security for the poor here. The local government has responded that they would remedy this by identifying those in greatest need and ensuring government programs reach them, but this has not been witnessed yet.

The Asian Legal Resources Centre calls upon the Human Rights Council to:
(a) Demand that the governments of Bangladesh, India and Nepal establish mechanisms to clearly identify the poorest persons in the country, and effectively target food aid in their direction, in order to fulfil their right to food with a transparent system that is open to public scrutiny.
(b) Encourage these governments to establish complaints mechanism for the poor who are being denied their right to food, in order for them to receive redress.
(c) Suggest that the Special Rapporteurs on the rights to food, health and water work together to propose a comprehensive approach that these governments can adopt to tackle child malnutrition and the wider problem of hunger and related disease and deaths in Bangladesh, India and Nepal, as these three State face similar challenges.

http://southasia.oneworld.net/todaysheadlines/poor-governance-corruption-driving-malnutrition-and-hunger-in-south-asia

POVERTY: IRAQ: Life on the margins: Iraqis struggle with poverty

22 Feb 2011
Faleha Hassan lives in a tiny house in central Baghdad with 11 other family members and, like thousands of protesters across Iraq, does not believe her leaders have done anything to make her life better.
"The politicians and the officials and the leadership, they don't care about us -- they have a lot of money but they don't think about others," laments the 67-year-old, surrounded by her grandchildren, sitting on the floor of the home in which she has lived for decades. "No one thinks about us. Not the officials."
Hassan, her children and her grandchildren suffer from what has proved a persistent problem in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein: poverty.
The elderly woman's only surviving son, Wissam, sells food to visitors entering the nearby Abdul Qader al-Gailani shrine in the centre of the capital, but usually earns a meagre 5,000 Iraqi dinars a day, or about US$4. An Iraqi MP, by contrast, makes more than 80 times as much.
Her husband has become too frail to continue helping Wissam, and another son, Mohammed, was killed in a suicide bombing at the shrine in January 2007. A ration programme, that during the Saddam-era included so many goods that Hassan said the family would sell the excess, has since been dramatically reduced.
That puts the family firmly below the government-defined poverty line of $2.2 per person per day, along with more than a fifth of all Iraqis, an estimated seven million people, a number that would rise were it not for the ration programme received by about six million families.
And while ministers have ambitious plans to slash that figure in the coming years, experts and, crucially, the people affected, are unconvinced.
"Poverty in Iraq is shallow," Deputy Planning Minister Mehdi al-Alak says during an interview in his office on the banks of the Tigris river. "Most people are close to the poverty line ... so if policies and procedures are followed, the rate will decline."
"It is not very difficult (to reduce poverty) in Iraq."
On paper, he would seem to be correct: the country's vast energy stores -- Iraq has the fourth-highest level of proven oil reserves in the world -- all but guarantee it will have a steady and increasing source of income for decades to come.
The country was not always grappling with such a problem. A UN report released at the beginning of the year notes that, "In the past, Iraq was regarded as one of the most developed countries in the Middle East," but the organisation's Arab Human Development Report rated Iraq 17th out of 21 regional countries in terms of human development in 2005.
"Wars and sanctions have contributed to a marked deterioration in Iraqis' standard of living in recent years," this year's UN report noted.
But experts lament that Iraq still has glaring problems that make it difficult to envision poverty levels declining at the rate the government hopes, from 22 percent now to 16 percent by 2015.
"Even though it is shallow and a wide segment of the population could be brought out of the poverty margin, unless there are sustainable measures, they will easily fall back," says Khalid Muhammed Khalid, an Amman-based Iraq programme analyst with the United Nations Development Programme.
Khalid notes widespread graft -- Transparency International rates Iraq as the world's fourth-most corrupt country -- and insufficient expertise among officials, especially at local and provincial levels, mean poverty alleviation could take longer than expected.
He adds that wider reforms will be needed rather than simply increasing people's incomes to better combat poverty.
"If you do not provide proper health, education and infrastructure services, then what is the meaning of more money?" he asks.
The UN's Iraq Briefing Book, for its part, calls for greater economic diversification, noting that the oil sector accounts for 65 percent of the economy, but just one percent of jobs.
Iraq has made some progress, with the government adopting a "National Strategy for Poverty Reduction" in late 2009, though Alak concedes that the plan pays scant attention to budgetary issues, and ministries are responsible for implementing recommendations, with little oversight yet carried out.
That plan outlines six key goals, from raising incomes by creating jobs for the needy, to reducing inequality between men and women, and improving health and education levels. Alak says it is unclear if the recommendations have been adopted by officials in other ministries or not, but a preliminary report on the plan's effectiveness due in May will provide insight.
The issue has been brought to the fore by protests in recent weeks across the country against high levels of unemployment and poor basic services such as clean water and electricity.
In response, the government has pledged to delay the implementation of a law that would raise tariffs on imports, and thereby increase prices of goods at markets, while MPs have cut politicians' pay and upped funding for the ration card programme by $1 billion, a 25 percent increase.
Like Hassan, however, few of Baghdad's poor are convinced by government assurances that it is tackling the issue.
"We don't have hope," says Sabiha Umm Ali, or Sabiha mother of Ali, who lives in a make-shift house in the middle of a waste dump in Zafaraniyah, east Baghdad. "I don't have hope."
"It has been like this for many years. There is no water, no electricity, no schools. I don't have confidence (in the government), it is impossible to trust them -- they care only for themselves, they live in their houses and villas, and forget about us."
As she speaks, another woman, Nehad Shalah begins to accost an Iraqi soldier assigned to guard the refuse site. "Why don't you help us?" she shouts at him. "Why don't you help us? Look at me! Am I a dog?"
Sabiha, a 60-year-old mother of eight children, only one of whom has a job, adds: "Don't we live in a country of oil and of wealth? Why, then, do we live like this?"
http://english.ahram.org.eg/NewsContent/3/12/6161/Business/Economy/Life-on-the-margins-Iraqis-struggle-with-poverty.aspx

GLOBAL FUND: The corruption issue

BEING attacked on Fox News was probably the worst, but all the past month has been horrid for the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, backed by $20 billion and one of the world’s biggest do-gooding outfits. Set up in 2002, it is used to appreciative coverage of its efforts to stamp out three of the deadliest diseases.

The unexpected woes started with an Associated Press story entitled “Fraud plagues global health fund” on January 23rd. It claimed that up to two-thirds of some grants went astray, with “astonishing” corruption in some cases. It cited faked invoices, phoney training events and other abuses, chiefly involving health ministries in some African countries. For Fund insiders, that was nothing new: evidence of the misuse of $34m paid out in Mali, Mauritania, Djibouti and Zambia became public knowledge in October.
The fund’s staff argued that the source was their own investigations (albeit of a small chunk of the billions it has distributed). Perhaps self-servingly, the fund’s fans argued that a tiny loss to corruption counted almost as a success given the problems that beset other aid efforts.
In retrospect, that looks complacent. Some donors issued cross statements. Germany, Spain, Sweden and the European Union said they would freeze payments into the Global Fund pending their own inquiries. Germany had promised $272m each year in 2011-13; Sweden had yet to make a pledge for that period, but was expected to do so. Spain has paid less than it pledged. Cynics wonder if the furore now gives politicians in Madrid a useful excuse.
Other politicians may indeed use the scandal to justify cutting back on commitments, not just to the Global Fund but to aid in general. Most rich-country budgets are under huge strain, and poor people in foreign countries are not votewinners.
An important test will be what the British government decides to do. At the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, the then leader of the opposition, David Cameron, made a surprise appearance at a dinner to discuss malaria and said that as prime minister he would keep to the target of giving 0.7% of Britain’s GDP in aid. He also praised the Global Fund as one of the best users of aid money. His government has kept that promise, even as it has cut public spending at home. So far, at least.
Nor is it just rich-world taxpayers’ money that is at stake. The Global Fund was designed as a model for a new approach to development, dubbed in that world’s opaque lexicon as “multi-stakeholder”. This means that as well as government grants, the Fund relies on gifts from other sources. One is wealthy philanthropists (the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest donors, says it will continue to give the Global Fund its full support). Another is from businesses. A third is from the public, including an idea called Product (RED) created by Bono, a rock-star activist at Davos, an event much favoured by the Fund’s glitzy backers. (RED) is a brand attached to products and services from firms such as Apple, Gap and Starbucks; part of the revenues go to the Global Fund’s work on HIV/Aids. The $160m raised so far by this scheme is not touched by the scandal.
Mystification has belatedly given way to action. “The Global Fund has zero tolerance for corruption,” insisted Michel Kazatchkine, its executive director, as he announced tougher controls and monitoring. He highlights the kind of spending at risk of going astray. “In three of the four cases, the corruption took place in budgets for training, through travel expenses, hotels, per diems.”
All of the money distributed by the Global Fund is handed over to national governments, so the Global Fund is to spend more money on local controls. It is doubling the budget of the independent inspector-general. A panel of international experts will review procedures. In December Mr Kazatchkine had ordered a freeze on training in all of the 140 countries to which the Global Fund sends money. This is now being melted one country at a time. Whether these new procedures will cost more to administer than the money lost in the corruption scandal remains to be seen, as is their effects on the fund’s operations, which were hitherto relatively speedy and unbureaucratic.
Yet with luck the changes will reassure the critics and start the money flowing again. The Global Fund sits on a big pile of credibility after more than meeting expectations in previous years. Sceptics may quibble with its claim to have saved at least 7m lives, and exactly how many more millions of lives it has improved, but mortality rates in the diseases it targets have dropped sharply. The fund’s approach to allocating aid wins plaudits too: it makes countries compete for money based less on their needs than on their ability to get things done. That has brought a switch from laggards to leaders of some $1.1 billion of the $13 billion so far paid out.
Until the latest storm broke, the aid world was abuzz with talk about expanding the fund’s remit to include maternal and child health. It would be odd if that plan stalls as a result of the corruption worries and if the money went instead to other international agencies. These tend to be less efficient and more prone to fraud. Though they may also be less likely to claim corruption as a sign of probity.
http://www.economist.com/node/18176062?story_id=18176062&fsrc=rss

MALARIA: Informed Comments on corruption and Global Fund activities

idowu.akanmu@gmail.com
Reply To: malaria@my.ibpinitiative.org
To: malaria@my.ibpinitiative.org
I wish to rehash that the intent of the Fund ab initio is to save lives in the poorest of the poor communities because the coventional governments in those places have failed their people as a result of widespread corruption and profligacy.

The right step to take by the OIG of the Global Fund is to expend more in strenthening country financial management systems and having more palpable presence in-country to forestall a situation whereby the children of Paul-the-peasant are damned and punished for the sins of Peter-the-extravagant.
I am happy to read that this is in the official response from the office of the OIG to Gerson's critique and I am confident that with such a development, more lives will be saved deservedly.
Grant portfolio managers of recipient countries need to pay more attention to foggy issues and do more to prevent unduly long grant negotiation periods that end up taking away the shine from the essence of such grants.
Bottom line from me is that hopes of millions should not be sacrificed on the altar of belated measures at ensuring financial monitoring and graft mitigation.
The baby is dirty, wash her clean, wipe her dry and do away with just the bathwater.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld from Glo Mobile.
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From: "Bright Orji"
Date: 5 Feb 2011 09:24:35 +0100
To: Malaria Update
ReplyTo: "Malaria Update"
Subject: [malaria] GFATM response
The efforts of the office of the Inspector General of GFATM is commendable. It is important to continue to build support for GFATM and encourage donor donations not to withhold their contributions while fighting to ensure that wrong use of the funds is put to a final stop.. The contributions of GFATM in the last few years have been enormous in saving the lives of those at risk in poorer nations of the world. I guess it will be better to save lives by not allowing those poor kids and women at risk to die than to stop the contributions due to the activities of evil ones in the society.
Jhpiego - Innovating to Save Lives
Orji Bright Jhpiego - An Affiliate of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
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From: William Brieger
To: Malaria Update
Sent: Sat, February 5, 2011 7:19:06 AM
Subject: [malaria] GFATM response
Seems the negative press that Gerson critiques so well still had some effect on the global fund even though as pointed out the Office of the Inspector General of the Global Fund seems to have had things well in hand -
NYT - World Briefing
AFRICA
Health Fund Adds Fraud ChecksBy CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: February 4, 2011
LinkedinDiggMixxMySpaceYahoo! BuzzPermalink.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced steps on Friday to strengthen antifraud safeguards, including doubling the budget for internal investigations. The group acted after a Jan. 23 article by The Associated Press described corruption in grants to Mali, Mauritania, Zambia and Djibouti. The fund said it was seeking to recover $34 million from those and other countries, an amount it said was less than 1 percent of the $13 billion in aid it has disbursed in 145 countries.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/world/africa/05briefs-HEALTHFUNDAD_BRF.html

William Brieger
http://www.malariafreefuture.org/blog/
Senior Malaria Specialist, JHPIEGO -
http://www.jhpiego.org/whatwedo/malaria.htm
Professor, Health Systems Program, Department of International Health
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
http://faculty.jhsph.edu/Default.cfm?faculty_id=90;
malaria updates at: http://twitter.com/bbbrieger