This is the seventeenth in a series of posts discussing themes from The Trouble With Aid by Jonathan Glennie. In chapter 7 the book discusses Direct Budget Support, the type of aid favoured by the UK. Direct Budget Support involves providing aid directly to the finance ministry of the recipient country, enabling the money to be used to fund programs that are run by the recipient country’s government.

This is thought to be an improvement on types of aid which circumvent the government of the recipient country because it respects the political priorities of the country’s government, and it helps to build institutional capacity or at least prevent institutional capacity from being destroyed. In theory it should also reduce doubling-up on administration and co-ordination of aid efforts and reduces the administrative burden on the recipient country in complying with multiple different aid conditionalities and reporting requirements.

On the other hand, the direct provision of aid to a government increases the opportunities for embezzlement, reduces the accountability of the government to its citizens by reducing the government’s reliance on tax revenue, and tends to strengthen governments and keep them in power when it might be in the interests of democracy in the recipient country to have a change of government.

Does climate change create wars? Many argue that it does. As unfavourable weather conditions reduce the amount of land suitable for farming in the poorer countries of the world, so the argument goes, disputes over shrinking resources become more frequent exacerbating inter-ethnic conflicts and leading eventually to war. However, a new study suggests that climate change has not been responsible for civil wars in Africa.

The research paper has been written by Halvard Buhaug of the Peace Research Institute, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. According to the paper, the available data on conflicts in Africa is insufficient to show any causative relationship between climate variability and conflict. On the other hand, there is a strong correlation between civil wars and economic disparity, ethnic tensions and historical political and economic instability.

The paper’s findings are somewhat inconvenient because the case for taking action to reduce climate change would be more compelling if it came with a substantial peace dividend. While it has been argued that the war in Darfur is essentially a battle for shrinking farmland attributable to the adverse effects of global warming, none of the parties to the conflict would identify climate change as a relevant factor.

When the news media talk about how many people are living in poverty, how many people were killed in a war, or how many people have been affected by a famine, where do they get the numbers from? Quite often the numbers are based on a poorly informed guess, which may get magnified as it is passed on. According to the Daily Nation, the myth about how many people live in the Kibera slums has been exploded by the 2009 Kenyan Census figures.

According to popular estimates, the number of people living in Kibera in an area of less than 2.5 square kilometres was between 500,000 and 1 million, with some estimates as high as 2 million. Depending on which estimate you accepted, Kibera was the biggest or second-biggest slum in Africa, or even the biggest slum in the world. That reputation has now taken a beating, with the Census figures showing the number of residents as just 170,070.

It seems that half of all Kenyans do live in absolute poverty, but only a small proportion of them live in Nairobi’s slums, if the census figures are correct. The total number living in slums according to the census is 618,916, out of a total population in the country of 38,610,097. Based on these figures, community development efforts have been over-servicing Kibera at the expense of the rest of the country.

On this day 42 years ago, Swaziland achieved its independence. The Kingdom of Swaziland is a small landlocked country bordering Mozambique to the east and otherwise entirely surrounded by South Africa. The history of the country since independence, like that of many other African countries, has not been an entirely happy one. Sixty percent of the population live in absolute poverty, and the HIV infection rate is the highest in the world at over 50% of adults in their 20s.

King Mswati III became the country’s head of state in 1986 following the death in 1982 of his father King Sobhuza II. The King appoints the prime minister and a number of the members of parliament, with the rest being elected. The current King is known for his many wives – currently 14 wives and 23 children – and his reckless extravagance in purchasing expensive cars and other luxury items at public expense.

Although the country has a parliament, the Swazi king is generally considered to be an absolute monarch with few practical limits to his power other than those imposed by tribal tradition. In response to the AIDS crisis, he proposed that all HIV-positive people should be sterilised and branded, but at the same time he persists in his personal polygamous practices.

There is nothing new about scepticism concerning resurrection. In the 15th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul addresses people who do not believe in resurrection. According to Paul, “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised… If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still answerable for your sins. Also anyone who has died in Christ has perished. If our hope in Christ only relates to this life, we are the most pathetic of all people.”

Christians believe that sin makes us imperfect, separating us from God who is perfect. The only way to reconcile ourselves to God is for the effects of our sin to be cancelled. Jesus died on the cross to pay the necessary price to cancel the sins of the world, and his resurrection is the sign that sin has been defeated. If Jesus did not defeat death, then he did not defeat sin, which would mean that our sins have not been cancelled and there remains an unbridgeable barrier between us and God.

So what is resurrection really like? Most people would prefer a body upgrade in the next life, with wrinkles, flab and other imperfections neatly airbrushed away. Paul makes it clear that our heavenly bodies will be quite unlike our earthly bodies: “I tell you, friends, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God. The perishable does not inherit the imperishable.”

It is reasonably well known that William Wilberforce campaigned for many years to end slavery in England. What is less known is the story of the community of friends that shared his struggles and his evangelical Christian faith. That is the story which Stephen Tomkins tells in his book The Clapham Sect: How Wilberforce’s Circle Transformed Britain. The friends included John Newton the author of “Amazing Grace”, John Thornton one of the richest businessmen in England, Hannah More a famous writer, Henry Thornton a famous banker and economist, and a number of other notable people.

Although Wilberforce and his friends never formed a separate church or religious group, they were pejoratively referred to some years after Wilberforce’s death as the “Clapham Sect”, and that name has persisted. As well as taking the lead in the anti-slavery fight, they were deeply involved in the colonisation of Sierra Leone as a new home for freed slaves. This turned out to be a highly unsuccessful social experiment. They were also involved in various campaigns to combat immorality and in the founding of the Church Missionary Society and various other missionary endeavours.

With the benefit of hindsight, many of the activities undertaken by Wilberforce and his friends can be regarded as mistaken; however in my view the author is a little too forceful in passing judgment on the moral views held by the members of the Clapham Sect. The story is an important one for Christians to be aware of, as it shows how a small group of sufficiently persistent Christians can create significant lasting differences in a whole country. I enjoyed reading the book, although I found some parts more engaging than others.

The “business-is-best” philosophy is powerful and seductive, but it is a dangerous mirage when applied to social change, according to Michael Edwards in his book Small Change: Why Business Won’t Save the World. To read my full review of the book, please visit my business blog.

This is the sixteenth in a series of posts discussing themes from The Trouble With Aid by Jonathan Glennie. In chapter 7 the book discusses the calls which have been made in the past five years for “more and better aid”. Most people and organisations in the aid trade recognise that there have been deficiencies with the ways in which aid has been handled in the past. Meetings of governments and civil society resulted in 2005 in the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, outlining ways in which aid needed to improve.

The five principles of the Paris Declaration are: Ownership – developing countries need to decide their own policies; Alignment – donors should support national strategies, institutions and procedures; Harmonisation – donors need to work better together; Managing for results – monitoring, decision making and resource management need to be improved; and Mutual accountability – developing countries should be accountable to donors, but donors should also be accountable to recipients for meeting their promised commitments.

According to Glennie, most reviews of the Paris process say that it is not ambitious enough, not working fast enough, is more problematic than anticipated, and fails to take into account the critical importance of the accountability of governments to citizens in recipient countries. Donors have been largely ignoring the five principles, and in Glennie’s view the Paris Declaration entirely overlooks the most serious problems with aid, such as aid’s negative impact on policy choices and on the effectiveness and accountability of state institutions.

Dan Pallotta has posted some interesting observations about charitable giving on his Harvard Business Review blog. Dan says that charitable giving in the US has been approximately 2% of GDP since 1970, and many humanitarian organisations proceed on the assumption that the rate of American generosity is fixed. However, a significant minority of people give away 10% of their income or more, suggesting that the overall amount of giving could be higher if the rest of the population could be persuaded to become equally generous.

According to an international comparison published by the Charities Aid Foundation in 2006, Australians gave 0.69% of GDP in charitable donations, compared with 1.67% for Americans and 0.14% for French people. Perhaps there is less felt need for charity in countries which have more extensive social security provided by the Government. According to Dan’s figures, religious Americans donated 3.5 times as much to charities overall, not just to religious institutions.

All of these facts lead to Dan’s assertion that charitable organisations need to invest a higher proportion of their funds in marketing in order to generate more income. This is obviously difficult advice to follow because of the popular perception that it is not ethical for such organisations to use donors’ funds for marketing. I wonder, though, whether something other than marketing may be a primary trigger for people’s generosity.

Accused genocidaire Omar al-Bashir, who is the subject of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court, was welcomed to Kenya last Friday, in contravention of Kenya’s obligation to arrest him. Dignitaries from a number of different countries were invited to witness the signing into effect of Kenya’s new constitution, and the welcome shown to al-Bashir seems to send a clear signal that people in power in Kenya intend to continue to regard themselves as being above the law.

The International Criminal Court is currently investigating a number of crimes that were committed in Kenya in 2008 in the wake of disputed elections. After Kenya’s parliament prevaricated for more than a year over how those responsible for perpetrating the crimes were to be tried, or whether they were to be held to account at all, responsibility for conducting the trials was handed over to the International Criminal Court.

It has been speculated that Kenya’s leadership as a whole does not want anyone to be held accountable for the post-election atrocities. There has been a long history of immunity with senior political figures not being held accountable for embezzlement, murder or any other types of crimes. The latest incident with al-Bashir suggests that the forthcoming International Criminal Court proceedings will not be met with co-operation.