The World Bank approaches malaria not only as a major public health issue but also as a broader development problem that costs Africa US$12 billion a year and helps keep families and communities in poverty. In 2005, the World Bank reaffirmed its commitment to malaria control by launching the Booster Program for Malaria Control in Africa, a 10-year initiative that in its first three years committed over US$470 million to malaria control on the continent. Focusing on a two-pronged approach of combining disease control interventions and health systems strengthening, the program has contributed significantly to the global effort to fight the disease. As Phase II (2008-2011) of the program begins, the World Bank will intensify its efforts to enable more countries in Africa to achieve and sustain large-scale impact on malaria. On September 25, 2008 World Bank President Robert B. Zoellick announced a US$1.1 billion expansion of the program at the United Nations Special Session on the Millennium Development Goals. The Phase II strategy establishes the rationale and basis for this doubling commitment. Whereas Phase I took advantage of relatively facile opportunities to support countries malaria control goals, Phase II is more strategic and builds on the successes of and lessons learned from Phase I. It is designed in a way that enables the World Bank to use its comparative advantages to contribute to the elimination of malaria as a major public health problem in parts of Africa by 2015, a goal set by the Roll Back Malaria Partnership and the United Nations Secretary General. Major reductions in malaria deaths and illness are possible within the next five to seven years. Attacking the disease full-force with a front-loaded effort will have tremendous impact on health and economic outcomes. African nations and the global community are gearing up to meet this goal. As one of the top three funders of malaria control, the World Bank is called to play a lead role in this effort. Phase II of the Booster Program for Malaria Control in Africa is the Bank s affirmative and emphatic response to this call."

Dependent Communities investigates the political situations in contemporary Cambodia and East Timor, where powerful international donors intervened following deadly civil conflicts. This comparative analysis critiques international policies that focus on rebuilding state institutions to accommodate the global market. In addition, it explores the dilemmas of politicians in Cambodia and East Timor who struggle to satisfy both wealthy foreign benefactors and constituents at home-groups whose interests frequently conflict. Hughes argues that the policies of Western aid organizations tend to stifle active political engagement by the citizens of countries that have been torn apart by war. The neoliberal ideology promulgated by United Nations administrations and other international NGOs advocates state sovereignty, but in fact "sovereignty" is too flimsy a foundation for effective modern democratic politics. The result is an oppressive peace that tends to rob survivors and former resistance fighters of their agency and aspirations for genuine postwar independence. In her study of these two cases, Hughes demonstrates that the clientelist strategies of Hun Sen, Cambodia's postwar leader, have created a shadow network of elites and their followers that has been comparatively effective in serving the country's villages, even though so often coercive and corrupt. East Timor's postwar leaders, on the other hand, have alienated voters by attempting to follow the guidelines of the donors closely and ignoring the immediate needs and voices of the people. Dependent Communities offers a searing analysis of contemporary international aid strategies based on the author's years of fieldwork in Cambodia and East Timor.

Africa is poor. If we send it money it will be less poor. It seems perfectly logical, doesn't it? Millions of people in the rich world, moved by images on television and appalled by the miserable conditions endured by so many in other countries, have joined campaigns to persuade their governments to double aid to Africa and help put an end to such shameful inequality. It seems simple. But it isn't. In this book, Jonathan Glennie argues that, along with its many benefits, government aid to Africa has often meant more poverty, more hungry people, worse basic services and damage to already precarious democratic institutions. Moreover, calls for more aid are drowning out pressure for action that would really make a difference for Africa's poor. Rather than doubling aid to Africa, it is time to reduce aid dependency. Through an honest assessment of both the positive and negative consequences of aid, this book will show you why.

Global poverty is falling rapidly, but in around fifty failing states, the world's poorest people face a tragedy that is growing inexorably worse. This bottom billion live on less than a dollar a day and while the rest of the world moves steadily forward, this forgotten billion is left further and further behind with potentially serious consequences not only for them but for the stability of the rest of the world. Why do the states these people live in defy all the attempts of the international aid community to help them? Why does nothing seem to make a difference? In The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier pinpoints the issues of corruption, political instability and resource management that lie at the root of the problem. He describes the battle raging in these countries between corrupt leaders and would-be reformers and the factors such as civil war, dependence on the export of natural resources and lack of good governance that trap them into a downward spiral of economic and social decline. Collier addresses the fact that conventional aid has been unable to tackle these problems and puts forward a radical new plan of action including a new agenda for the G8 which includes more effective anti-corruption measures, preferential trade policies and where necessary direct military intervention. All of these initiatives are carefully designed to help the forgotten bottom billion, one of the key challenges facing the world in the twenty first century.

Arguing forcefully that changing times are a clarion call for new thinking, this book convincingly shows that if humanitarian organizations continue to operate as they have in the past, they will fail to help the very victims whom they try to save. Focusing especially on the emergence of 'new wars, ' Hoffman and Weiss insist that humanitarian organizations must recognize that they live in a political world and that their actions and goals are invariably affected by military action. The brand of warfare that erupted in the 1990s-marked by civil or transnational armed conflicts featuring potent non-state actors, altered political economies, a high proportion of civilian casualties, and a globalized media-produced horrors that shocked consciences and led humanitarian agencies to question their unyielding stance of neutrality and impartiality. Indeed, in a departure from earlier norms and practices, some have reinvented their policies and tools and created 'new humanitarianisms.' This authoritative book traces the evolution of the international humanitarian system from its inception in the 1860s, parses the dynamics of war and emergency response from the 1980s through the current disasters in Afghanistan and Iraq, and provides a strategic roadmap for practitioners. By bringing historical perspective to bear, this volume provides an invaluable analytical framework for grasping the nature of humanitarian crises and how agencies can respond strategically rather than reactively to change. Students will find its blend of clearly presented theory and case studies a powerful tool for understanding the roles of state and non-state actors in international relations. By charting the tides of continuity and change, this book will prepare agencies to dodge both figurative and actual bullets that threaten humanitarian action at the outset of the millennium.

Today there is a preoccupation among development agencies and researchers with getting policy right; with exerting influence over policy, linking research to policy and with implementing policy around the world. But what if development practice is not driven by policy at all? Suppose that the things that make for 'good policy' - policy which legitimises and mobilises political support - in reality make it impractical and impossible to implement? By focusing in detail on the activities of a development project in tribal western India over more than ten years as it falls under different policy regimes, this book takes a close look at the relationship between policy and practice in development. David Mosse shows how the actions of development workers are shaped by the exigencies of organisations and the need to maintain relationships rather than by policy. Raising unfamiliar questions, Mosse provides a rare self-critical reflection on practice, while refusing to endorse current post-modern dismissal of development.

Can foreign donors help build new democracies? In the 1990s, public and private organizations such as USAID and the Soros Foundation poured huge amounts of money and expertise into Russia to help build the dream of a vibrant democratic society. Sarah L. Henderson argues that despite the altruistic intentions of foreign assistance agencies and domestic activists, foreign aid designed to spur civic growth has had unintended consequences. Drawing on extensive field work, survey research, and work experience for several funding agencies in Moscow in the late 1990s, Henderson focuses on donor efforts to support the emerging community of nongovernmental organizations and, in particular, on efforts to build a functioning women's movement in Russia. Her intimate knowledge of Russia's growing NGO community informs a worrisome finding: foreign aid has made a tremendous difference, but not in altogether expected or positive ways. New Russian civic groups serve either the needs of an indigenous clientele or the demands of the foreign aid bureaucracy but rarely both. Henderson's research and experience show that while aid has kept a fledgling civic community alive, it is a civic community that is disconnected from its own domestic audience. The book suggests that large flows of foreign aid have in some ways damaged the long-term prospects for democratization in Russia."

With the number of violent conflicts within countries increasing all the time, as well as other forms of natural and man-made complex emergencies, humanitarian intervention has become a much more frequent form of development assistance. There has also been a corresponding rise in the need to evaluate the effectiveness of such interventions. In this volume, the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Assistance (ALNAP) has compiled for the first time an examination of the experiences of, and lessons learned by, those practically engaged in humanitarian programme evaluations.
The case studies included in this volume are drawn from four continents, including Central Asia and the Balkans, and they embrace the different kinds of humanitarian emergency that have afflicted so many people during the past decade. The volume addresses the context in which evaluations of humanitarian assistance take place; the actual process of doing evaluations; and the lessons for improving how such evaluations might be better undertaken in future.
This pioneering volume is likely to be of great practical value to agencies and individuals engaged in both the delivery of humanitarian assistance in complex emergencies and its evaluation.

Worldwide more and more governments have begun to buckle under a variety of strains, including the ongoing pressures of economic crisis, followed by structural adjustment programmes, and the impact of declining legitimacy, often resulting in the outbreak of civil war. In this study of aid policy, Joanna Macrae argues that the disintegration of state authority and civil order has created acute problems in aid management. Largely ignored by major aid organizations, insecurity and failures of governance are now the major obstacles to aid reaching those in most need. International aid has traditionally assumed the existence of stable, sovereign states capable of making policy. In a number of developing countries, including post-conflict regimes like Cambodia, Uganda or Kosovo, this is no longer the case. The big donor agencies have usually responded by suspending development aid and substituting some kind of emergency or relief assistance. Now, as the author shows, there are calls to make relief more development-oriented and for it to address the underlying conflicts which causes these crises. But she concludes from her investigations on the ground in a number of countries that relief and development aid are very distinct processes. In the absence of public policy-making authorities, aid becomes highly fragmented, often inadequate in scale, and certainly not capable of building local sustainability for particular programmes. The international aid system, she concludes, faces real dilemmas and remains ill-equipped to respond to the peculiar challenges of quasi-statehood that characterize chronic political emergencies and their aftermath. An important book for policy makers, scholars and students of the development process wrestling with 'real world' issues of aid delivery.

This book documents and analyses the involvement of Norway in the liberation struggle in Southern Africa. Apart from focussing on the formulation of official policies and the extensive cooperation with the liberation movements in the field of humanitarian assistance, mainly based on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs records, the study highlights the popular involvement and commitment to the struggle. Separate chapters are concerned with the churches, trade unions and solidarity movements, such as the Norwegian Council for Southern Africa and the Namibia Committee. The book also includes a case study on the battle for sanctions.The Study forms part of the Nordic Africa Institute's research and documentation project "National Liberation in Southern Africa: The Role of the Nordic Countries."

From Rwanda to Bosnia-Herzegovina to Kosovo and beyond, devastating human tragedies have torn apart communities -- and too often, the international response has been ineffective. Here now is a wealth of pragmatic information on how the international community can help these regions rebuild their communities.

The 'anthropology of development' is already challenging the received wisdom of development thought and practice. In this book, Crewe and Harrison build on existing work by using their own experience of aid projects in Africa and Asia to examine a number of deep-seated assumptions in the minds of 'developers'. Flawed notions about progress, gender, technology, partnership, motivation, culture and race persist, and there are yawning gaps between these and the policies and actual practices of development. Through ethnographic case material from two different organizations - one an international NGO, the other a multilateral agency - the authors explore what actually happens when expatriate development personnel, local government officials and the intended beneficiaries of aid interact with one another. They describe how power inequalities based on race, class and gender are reflected in the processes of aid. This is a work of considerable subtlety. The authors find the dichotomies between 'us', the 'developers', and 'them', the 'beneficiaries' of development, inadequate. They question the apparently monolithic power of the developers, and show the need for a more nuanced, contextual account of the complex and often ambiguous relationships that exist within the aid industry. And while it refuses to provide simple answers, this book greatly enriches our understanding of the cultural and structural dynamics of the development process.

Spending on U.S. foreign affairs, which constitutes only about one percent of the federal budget, is being sharply reduced. Under the President's 1996 budget plan, it will decline by just as great a percentage as defense between 1990 and 2002--and by substantially more than defense over the 1980-2002 period. No other major category of federal spending will undergo a real cut over either time period. The shrinking budget, totaling about $19 billion in 1997, will still have to fund the State Department, international broadcasting and educational exchanges, trade subsidies and investment guarantees for U.S. business overseas; United Nations operations including peacekeeping, and all types of foreign assistance. In this book, O'Hanlon and Graham focus primarily on this last component of international spending. Specifically, they analyze U.S. official development assistance (ODA) to poor countries. The authors place U.S. ODA in a broad historical, international, and economic perspective. They then recommend an alternative approach to ODA for the United States as well as other donors. They favor continuing to provide humanitarian and grass-roots aid to most poor countries, but providing ODA to promote macroeconomic growth only to those countries that maintain coherent, market-oriented economic policy frameworks. The authors argue that to provide effective aid, as well as to maintain U.S. leadership in world affairs, net resources for ODA and the international account need to increase only modestly.

The fifteen papers presented here examine three centuries of close, if sometimes ambiguous, links between Christian mission and medicine. The authors, who include theologians, historians, sociologists, physicians and representatives of major international health-care organisations, address themselves to such questions as: How is one to assess the results of past missionary health-care effort? How are modern-day Christian organisations to cope with the burden of institutions set up in the past? What links should the Churches maintain with official medical organisations? What position should the Churches take on the 'faith v. healing' debate begun by certain religious groups? And how is one to lay the groundwork of a theology of health and healing?
The complexity of the issues outlined here can - alas - provide no easy answers.
Quinze auteurs, compris thiologiens, historiens, sociologues, midecins et responsables d'organisations sanitaires, ont centri leurs riflections sur le rtle des Iglises chritiennes dans le domaine de la santi, hier dans les pays de mission, aujourd'hui dans ces mjmes rigions oy se m{rit une viritable inculturation du christianisme.
Dans cet ouvrage ils abordent plusieurs questions fondamentales: comment ivaluer les risultats et lacunes de l'action sanitaire des missions dans le passi? Les communauties chritiennes actuelles doivent-elles porter le poids d'institutions mises en place hier? Quels rapports les Iglises doivent-elles entretenir avec les organisations midicales officielles? Comment les Iglises se situent-elles dans la dialectique 'foi-guirison' diveloppie par certains groupes religieux? Plus profondiment, comment poser les jalons d'une thiologiede la santi et de la guirison?
Trouver les reponses sur ces questions complexes c'est une tache trhs dilicate.

At the age of 48, Moritz Thomsen sold his pig farm and joined the Peace Corps. As he tells the story, his awareness of the comic elements in the human situation -- including his own -- and his ability to convey it in fast-moving, earthy prose have made Living Poor a classic.

"Hilariously funny at times, grimly sad at others and leavened with perceptive insights into the ways of the people and with breathtaking descriptions of the Ecuadorian landscape". -- St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp is one of the world's largest, home to over 100,000 people drawn from across east and central Africa. Though notionally still a 'temporary' camp, it has become a permanent urban space in all but name with businesses, schools, a hospital and its own court system. Such places, Bram J. Jansen argues, should be recognised as 'accidental cities', a unique form of urbanization that has so far been overlooked by scholars. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, Jansen's book explores the dynamics of everyday life in such accidental cities. The result is a holistic socio-economic picture, moving beyond the conventional view of such spaces as transitory and desolate to demonstrate how their inhabitants can develop a permanent society and a distinctive identity. Crucially, the book offers important insights into one of the greatest challenges facing humanitarian and international development workers: how we might develop more effective strategies for managing refugee camps in the global South and beyond. An original take on African urbanism, Kakuma Refugee Camp will appeal to practitioners and academics across the social sciences interested in social and economic issues increasingly at the heart of contemporary development.

Foreign aid is about charity. International development is about technical fixes. At least that is what we, as donor publics, are constantly told. The result is a highly dysfunctional aid system which mistakes short-term results for long-term transformation and gets attacked across the political spectrum, with the right claiming we spend too much, and the left that we don't spend enough. The reality, as Yanguas argues in this highly provocative book, is that aid isn't - or at least shouldn't be - about levels of spending, nor interventions shackled to vague notions of 'accountability' and 'ownership'. Instead, a different approach is possible, one that acknowledges aid as being about struggle, about taking sides, about politics. It is an approach that has been quietly applied by innovative development practitioners around the world, providing political coverage for local reformers to open up spaces for change. Drawing on a variety of convention-defying stories from a variety of countries - from Britain to the US, Sierra Leone to Honduras - Yanguas provides an eye-opening account of what we really mean when we talk about aid.

A Samaritan State Revisited brings together a refreshing group of emerging and leading scholars to reflect on the history of Canada's overseas development aid. Addressing the broad ideological and institutional origins of Canada's official development assistance in the 1950s and specific themes in its evolution and professionalization after 1960, this collection is the first to explore Canada's history with foreign aid with this level of interrogative detail. Extending from the 1950s to the present and covering Canadian aid to all regions of the Global South, from South and Southeast Asia to Latin America and Africa, these essays embrace a variety of approaches and methodologies ranging from traditional, archival-based research to textual and image analysis, oral history, and administrative studies. A Samaritan State Revisited weaves together a unique synthesis of governmental and non-governmental perspectives, providing a clear and readily accessible explanation of the forces that have shaped Canadian foreign aid policy.

It was long assumed that the Soviet Union dictated Warsaw Pact policy in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America (known as the 'Third World' during the Cold War). Although the post-1991 opening of archives has demonstrated this to be untrue, there has still been no holistic volume examining the topic in detail. Such a comprehensive and nuanced treatment is virtually impossible for the individual scholar thanks to the linguistic and practical difficulties in satisfactorily covering all of the so-called 'junior members' of the Warsaw Pact. This important book fills that void and examines the agency of these states - Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania - and their international interactions during the 'discovery' of the 'Third World' from the 1950s to the 1970s. Building upon recent scholarship and working from a diverse range of new archival sources, contributors study the diplomacy of the eastern and central European communist states to reveal their myriad motivations and goals (importantly often in direct conflict with Soviet directives). This work, the first revisionist review of the role of the junior members as a whole, will be of interest to all scholars of the Cold War, whatever their geographical focus.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was one of the deadliest disasters in modern history, sparking an international aid response - with pledges and donations of $16 billion - that was exceedingly generous. But now, five years later, that generous aid has clearly failed. In Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, anthropologist Mark Schuller captures the voices of those involved in the earthquake aid response, and they paint a sharp, unflattering view of the humanitarian enterprise. Schuller led an independent study of eight displaced-persons camps in Haiti, compiling more than 150 interviews ranging from Haitian front-line workers and camp directors to foreign humanitarians and many displaced Haitian people. The result is an insightful account of why the multi-billion-dollar aid response not only did little to help but also did much harm, triggering a range of unintended consequences, rupturing Haitian social and cultural institutions, and actually increasing violence, especially against women. The book shows how Haitian people were removed from any real decision-making, replaced by a top-down, NGO-dominated system of humanitarian aid, led by an army of often young, inexperienced foreign workers. Ignorant of Haitian culture, these aid workers unwittingly enacted policies that triggered a range of negative results. Haitian interviewees also note that the NGOs ""planted the flag"", and often tended to ""just do something"", always with an eye to the ""photo op"" (in no small part due to the competition over funding). Worse yet, they blindly supported the eviction of displaced people from the camps, forcing earthquake victims to relocate in vast shantytowns that were hotbeds of violence. Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti concludes with suggestions to help improve humanitarian aid in the future, perhaps most notably, that aid workers listen to - and respect the culture of - the victims of catastrophe.

Aid workers commonly bemoan that the experience of working in the field sits uneasily with the goals they've signed up to: visiting project sites in air-conditioned Land Cruisers while the intended beneficiaries walk barefoot through the heat, or checking emails from within gated compounds while surrounding communities have no running water. Spaces of Aid provides the first book-length analysis of what has colloquially been referred to as Aid Land. It explores in depth two high-profile case studies, the Aceh tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, in order to uncover a fascinating history of the objects and spaces that have become an endemic yet unexamined part of the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

Aid workers commonly bemoan that the experience of working in the field sits uneasily with the goals they've signed up to: visiting project sites in air-conditioned Land Cruisers while the intended beneficiaries walk barefoot through the heat, or checking emails from within gated compounds while surrounding communities have no running water. Spaces of Aid provides the first book-length analysis of what has colloquially been referred to as Aid Land. It explores in depth two high-profile case studies, the Aceh tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, in order to uncover a fascinating history of the objects and spaces that have become an endemic yet unexamined part of the delivery of humanitarian assistance.

This authoritative report by NCB and NCVO provides a comprehensive analysis of the children and young people's voluntary sector in England. Using a combination of quantitative analysis of Charity Commission data, qualitative interviews with commissioners and practitioners, and a summary of the existing literature on the sector, The Ripple Effect provides an insight into the make-up and work of the sector, the relationship between the sector and government and the difference the sector makes to the lives of children and families across the country.

In her controversial, no-holds-barred expose Linda Polman shows how a vast industry has grown up around humanitarian aid. "The Crisis Caravan" takes us to war zones around the globe, showing how aid operations and the humanitarian world have become a feature of military strategy. Impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman "gives some powerful examples of unconscionable assistance...a world where aid workers have become enablers of the atrocities they seek to relieve" ("The Boston Globe").