THE WORLD Bank has called for a major rethink in the way that aid is spent. In a report released yesterday, the Washington-based lender said that when rebuilding a war-torn country, more emphasis should be placed on establishing security than on areas of economic development such as health and education.
Some 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by organised violence, according to the bank, with 90 per cent of recent wars occurring in countries that already had a civil war in the last 30 years.
“To break these cycles, it is crucial to strengthen legitimate national institutions and governance in order to provide citizen security, justice and jobs,” the World Bank said.
Looking at countries such as Chile and Indonesia that have made the transition from conflict to stability, the report’s authors say that progress in post-conflict nations is possible within a generation, or about 25 years.
Mozambique, for example, has more than tripled its primary school completion rate in just eight years, from 14 per cent in 1999 to 46 per cent in 2007. The former Portuguese colony has been at peace since 1992, when 16 years of civil war came to an end.
However, the report cautions against stability by any means.
“Some states have tried to maintain stability through coercion and patronage networks, but those with high levels of corruption and human rights abuses increase their risks of violence breaking out in the future.”
The report was welcomed by many in the development community. They say that insecurity can dramatically wipe out gains in other sectors.
“Of the big livelihood issues the development industry focuses on – health, education, water and security – security comes first,” said John Githongo, the veteran Kenyan anti-corruption campaigner and founder of the Inuka Kenya Trust, a civil rights organisation.
“We may be finally learning that pouring aid into failed and failing states, imagining that somehow it can be ‘ring-fenced’ from powerful underlying narratives” – such as corruption and the rule of law – “does not work. Aid is getting smart. This is an encouraging trend.”
According to the report, “poverty rates are 20 percentage points higher in countries affected by repeated cycles of violence over the last three decades”.
People in fragile and conflict-affected states, for example, “are more than twice as likely to be undernourished as those in other developing countries, more than three times as likely to be unable to send their children to school, twice as likely to see their children die before age five and more than twice as likely to lack clean water.”
These countries also tend to have high unemployment, which surveys found to be “overwhelmingly the most important factor” in driving up recruitment to rebel movements and armed gangs.
This could grossly affect neighbouring countries, with nations losing an estimated 0.7 per cent of their annual gross domestic product for each neighbour involved in civil wars.