EDITORIAL - Beyond foreign aid

Donorland is not Disneyland. This is according to Koos Richelle, director general of the EuropeAid Cooperation Office of the European Commission. Richelle addressed the opening of the Asia-Europe Meeting or ASEM conference yesterday in Makati, which aims to promote better understanding and deeper cooperation between the two regions amid the global economic downturn.

Like other aid donors, the Europeans want to make sure their development aid is properly utilized. EuropeAid, whose assistance is also geared toward the achievement of Millennium Development Goals, is committed to providing bigger aid to countries in need by 2015. But this means that EC members and European taxpayers will increasingly want to see tangible results of their aid, Koos told the ASEM conference. Foreign aid alone has never been enough to lift any country from poverty, he pointed out. For sustainable development, Koos said foreign aid must be backed by “quality leadership” and governance.

Filipinos can only agree. Though the country has been a major recipient of aid from the international donor community for many years, poverty alleviation has progressed at a slow pace. Worse, foreign-funded projects and official development assistance have become mired in corruption scandals. The latest involved road projects financed by the World Bank, which debarred seven contractors, three of them Philippine companies, for rigging the bidding for the project. Before this there was the corruption scandal, still unresolved, involving the broadband network deal between the government and China’s ZTE Corp., whose funding was supposed to be sourced from Chinese ODA.

The ZTE mess is an example of what happens when foreign aid donors do not seek some form of accountability from aid recipients in the utilization of ODA. Tacking on such rules, and reminding recipient countries of the limits of foreign aid, could help bring about good governance.