Editorial»
Awakening
DEC 27 - The Asian Development Bank’s admission that its past strategies and programmes were not effective enough to make the desired impact on the lives of the poor Nepalis is true. It was a humble acknowledgement on the part of ADB’s Country Director Hafeez Rahman. The same holds true for all the multilateral and bilateral donors. It is just that they lack the guts of Rahman to admit the reality.
Nepal has been unsuccessful in preventing people from falling into the poverty trap, and the ratio of total number of absolute poor (deprived of 2200 calories of intake a day) has been on the rise. Ironically, the number of urban and rural poor has not abated even after the multilateral agencies tagged the aid with the government policies. Tagging the aid with the policies started from the mid-1980s when Nepal adopted the International Monetary Fund’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). It would, however, be unfair to blame only the donor agencies for the deteriorating living conditions of the Nepalis. There are hordes of social, economic, political, cultural and other issues responsible for the lack of economic development in the country. Still, the donor agencies’ timely realization of inefficient use of their aid money could have prevented the situation from worsening to the current level.
There is no doubt about the intentions of the donors. The multilateral and bilateral agencies have been honest in the development of the country, but the approach was not just right. Rahman’s realization that ADB bypassed the remote and less developed areas, and failed to value the potentials of the grassroots is valid. Similarly, the practice of involving only the government at the programme preparation level is also true. It might sound too critical to blame the donor agencies for the failure of development programmes. However, if donors tag aid with economic reforms, monetary policy, good governance, human rights et al, they should also share some blame, along with the government, for the failure of those programmes. After all, when any towed programme becomes successful, the concerned donors do not hesitate to take the credit and replicate the same in other countries.
The issue of donors’ responsibility wouldn’t have surfaced, had the government been transparent, efficient and accountable. Unfortunately, the morale and efficiency of the bureaucracy has been eroding with every change in the government, and we are developing an over-dependency syndrome. Since the situation is not ideal, it is but natural to expect donors to consider about the poor of Nepal. Let us hope that the ADB’s acknowledgment of its lackings in the past will inspire the donor community so that they become accountable to the people they are trying to help more than anybody else.
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