Tuesday, 31 August 2010
Kudos to Moses and his team
Last week we heard that a senior member of the international diplomatic community in Kigali had been in touch with our English language centre, the Rwanda Multi Learning Centre. They told us we have the reputation of being the best placein Rwanda tp study the English language. Consequently one of our (paying)students will be an ambassador's son. All credit goes to our director Moses and his hard working team of teachers and students. They deserve this recognition.
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
monitoring human rights is a good investment
The UK government has announced it is to stop monitoring human rights abuses around the globe. Previously the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) produced an annual summary that was used within government and beyond, as an invaluable guide to which countries were oppressing their own citizens. Initiated by the much missed Robin Cook, it was a good investment for two reasons:
1) So long as the UK continues to preach to other nations the virtues of accountability, transparency, democracy and human rights, it needs to ensure Britain is not propping up repressive or corrupt governments by selling them things, especially weapons or torture equipment, or laundering their dirty money. Ifall the UK cares about is trade, then we should have the honest to admit as much. If, however, we continue to lecture other countries, we should keep our own exporters in order. We should also be wary of selling arms and cosying up to the kind of regimes that may one day turn against us, as we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2) The FCO review was useful in stopping the UK government itself propping up appalling regimes through its generous foriegn aid programme, in the form of donations from the Department for International Development (DFID). In some regrettable cases DFID supports dictatorships with donations, for either geopolitical or other\reasons (too tedious to go into here - but email me if you are interested). We have a much better chance of restraining the UK's misguided generosity if we can produce its own FCO data indicating the disappointing human rights record of the kleptomaniacs we are propping up.
The cost of the FCO annual human rights review was tiny compared to the sums handed out under the guise of international development aid.
1) So long as the UK continues to preach to other nations the virtues of accountability, transparency, democracy and human rights, it needs to ensure Britain is not propping up repressive or corrupt governments by selling them things, especially weapons or torture equipment, or laundering their dirty money. Ifall the UK cares about is trade, then we should have the honest to admit as much. If, however, we continue to lecture other countries, we should keep our own exporters in order. We should also be wary of selling arms and cosying up to the kind of regimes that may one day turn against us, as we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2) The FCO review was useful in stopping the UK government itself propping up appalling regimes through its generous foriegn aid programme, in the form of donations from the Department for International Development (DFID). In some regrettable cases DFID supports dictatorships with donations, for either geopolitical or other\reasons (too tedious to go into here - but email me if you are interested). We have a much better chance of restraining the UK's misguided generosity if we can produce its own FCO data indicating the disappointing human rights record of the kleptomaniacs we are propping up.
The cost of the FCO annual human rights review was tiny compared to the sums handed out under the guise of international development aid.
Friday, 20 August 2010
Girls and Women - A great investment
If the world's wealthy nations were serious about encouraging development in poor countries, they could achieve an excellent return on their investment by prioritising the education of girls and women. Nothing offers a greater guarantee of transforming the lives of individuals involved, their families, the economy of their countries and their society.
The UK Department for International Development recently released its 2010-15 education strategy, and it contained the following important statistics:
1) Every additional year of education for girls can cut infant mortality by 5-10%
2) Every additonal year of education can raise lifetime earnings in poor countries by 10%.
Taken with UN research on the impact of education on girls, it is clear that educated girls are more likely to have healthier children, too.
Put simply, education is the way to break the cycle of poverty into which poor families become trapped. This is hardly rocket science, but it seems we all need to be reminded that more complicated and expensive 'fixes' don't always achieve as much.
There is now extensive evidence from countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua and Cambodia that programmes that offer cash to parents who keep their children in school reaps massive benefits. This is especially helpful to girls, who are the ifrst to be kept home from school to do domestic and agricultural work or to care for unwell family members. (World Bank, "Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty")
The UK Department for International Development recently released its 2010-15 education strategy, and it contained the following important statistics:
1) Every additional year of education for girls can cut infant mortality by 5-10%
2) Every additonal year of education can raise lifetime earnings in poor countries by 10%.
Taken with UN research on the impact of education on girls, it is clear that educated girls are more likely to have healthier children, too.
Put simply, education is the way to break the cycle of poverty into which poor families become trapped. This is hardly rocket science, but it seems we all need to be reminded that more complicated and expensive 'fixes' don't always achieve as much.
There is now extensive evidence from countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua and Cambodia that programmes that offer cash to parents who keep their children in school reaps massive benefits. This is especially helpful to girls, who are the ifrst to be kept home from school to do domestic and agricultural work or to care for unwell family members. (World Bank, "Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty")
Sunday, 1 August 2010
aid and the UN
Linda Polman's new book, War Games, is a must read for those who are not convinced that development aid is achieving all we wish. She also looks at situations where aid organisations keep people alive, without protecting them (Bosnia, Darfur) or disarming the people who are trying to kill them. Her chapters on Rwanda are devastating, describing how the international community rushed to help the people who committed the genocide, but not the victims. Polman's previous book, We Did Nothing, is about the uselessness of UN peacekeeping forces (Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, again) when there is no political will behind peacekeeping missions. She describes how most peacekeepers are recruited from bangladesh and pakistan, and aren't even soldiers. They are unemployed boys collected from villages, put in uniforms and sent off to war zones with no training. The government who supplies them gets $1000 a month from the UN. Romeo Dallaire (Rwanda) describes how the first time he issued orders to a company of these UN peacekeepers, they wet their pants in terror.
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