CIDA and the Money Doublers By Ian Smillie Published May 19, 2010

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USAID Photo: J. Dunlop

A young mother and her baby in Tanzania.

Much ink has been spilled over Canada's so-called G8 initiative on maternal and child health for the developing world. Many have urged the government forward on this laudable mission, while others—demonized as spiteful people with a narrow domestic agenda—have railed against the government's exclusion of funding for abortion.

The facts behind the debate are more complicated than this.

First, maternal and child health is already high on the agenda of most donor countries. These two items are pillars of the UN's Millennium Development Goals, and maternal health has been a priority for many countries for years. But not Canada. It would appear that Canada has simply woken up to a need that has been out there for as long as CIDA has existed.

Second, botched abortions take the lives of 25,000 African women every year and injure 1.7 million more. The provision of access to safe, legal abortion is part of any responsible maternal health plan—in Africa as it is in Canada.

But there is something more misleading in this debate. The Harper government tells us that Canada has doubled aid since 2001 and that we have also doubled aid to Africa since 2003. And now we are about to display even greater generosity in order to save millions of lives and improve aid spending.

If they look more closely, Canadians will see that the government's numbers on aid spending include a lot of things the OECD disallows in the definition of official development assistance. The reality is that on a per capita basis Canada gives one third of what the Netherlands, the Nordics and even Luxembourg do, and we barely reach half the OECD average. In fact we rank near the bottom of the generosity table—15^th out of 23 OECD countries.

In addition, having "doubled" aid, the Harper government says it will now "cap" it at current levels. This means that as Canada's economy grows, our aid program will stagnate, and we will become even less generous towards those in dire straits.

Worse, having bragged about our munificence, Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon announced in February that there won't be any increase for Africa until he is sure the money spent so far has not been wasted.

This horse-and-barn-door approach to public spending makes no sense. If he wasn't sure it was going to be spent well, why double it? As foreign minister, all he needs to do is read CIDA's reports—most projects and programs are monitored, audited and evaluated by the government on a regular basis.

So if there isn't going to be any new Canadian money behind the big new push on maternal and child health, where will the funding coming from?

In Canada's case, it will have to be taken away from other priorities, perhaps other important Millennium Development Goals such as universal primary education, gender equality, HIV/AIDS, malaria or tuberculosis. Or perhaps from Canadian aid groups unwilling to fall in line behind government priorities.

In April, CIDA announced new "initiatives" for Africa worth up to $178 million, initiatives that will lead to "a bright future" for children and youth. CIDA's spin doctors used the words "new" and "initiative" eight times in a short press release.

The announced budget is almost precisely the amount CIDA will save through the closure last year of aid programs to eight very poor African countries (and coincidentally about the same as the announced cost overrun for security at the G8 and G20 meetings).

Canadians might be forgiven for viewing the closure of African aid programs and the subsequent announcement of "new initiatives" for Africa as a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. Or it could be seen as yet another rearrangement of CIDA's deck chairs, a bunch of new initiatives and new priorities in an agency that the auditor general has chastised for its constantly changing sectors and themes.

The deck chair analogy is appropriate. For almost three years, Minister Bev Oda has played iceberg to CIDA's Titanic, closing programs, dragging respected NGOs to the financial brink, hunting down and defunding any whose messages on human rights and gender she doesn't like, and delaying so much spending that the OECD actually shows a 9.5 per cent reduction in Canadian development assistance between 2008 and 2009. So much for doubling aid.

Many argue that the issue is more about aid quality than aid volume. On that front, the World Bank recently came out with what it calls an "aid quality donor ranking." This examines quality rather than quantity, judging donors on the basis of their allocations to areas of greatest need, their alignment with recipient country priorities, co-ordination with other donors and level of specialization. On this list Canada ranks 29^th out of 38.

In Nigeria there are people who make a living as Money Doublers. They persuade the gullible to put an amount of money in an envelope that is then sealed. For a fee, the Money Doubler performs an incantation and warns the client not to open the envelope for a month, or the effort will fail. Most begin to worry after a few days, and do not wait, opening their envelope to find nothing but cut newspaper. Many blame themselves for failing to wait.

Last week, the Canadian International Council and the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute issued a report entitled Reinventing CIDA. They called for an end to the merry-go-round programming and politics of Canada's foreign aid. And they called for sweeping reforms that would allow the agency to do what taxpayers expect it to do: help end poverty.

What few Canadians appreciate is that the Harper government and its CIDA minister have already reinvented CIDA, killing Canada's efforts in some of the world's poorest countries and damaging our once proud reputation as a thoughtful, generous leader in development assistance.

Ian Smillie, an Ottawa-based development consultant and writer, is the author of Freedom from Want. He is a member of the McLeod Group, a new voice for a rejuvenated Canadian role in the world. For more information, go to www.mcleodgroup.ca

editor@embassymag.ca