afleitch
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« on: July 09, 2006, 04:08:16 PM » |
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Part II
The expected budget for Development Assistance for 2006, as laid out in the original report is $324 million unfortunately down on previous years, and a result our international reputation for delivering competent and comprehensive aid is somewhat undermined. If these cuts are taken into account, without any changes in the structure of expenditure, the regional outlooks is as follows with the largest individual recipients recorded in brackets.
Middle East and North Africa: 24.07% (Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Israel)
Sub Saharan Africa: 23.81% (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia)
South and Central Asia: 12.87% (Afghanistan, Pakistan)
Latin America and the Carribean: 12.43% (Columbia)
Other Asia and Oceania: 4.22% (Russia)
Europe: 3.63%
Unspecified: 18.42%
The very fact that 18% of our aid goes to areas classified as 'unspecified' appears to shows a lack of transparency within the department. This gap must be closed in order to maintain a degree of accountability, yet it must also be remembered that the State Department may, covertly, allocate funding to poltically sensitive countries and regions and secondly may allocate funding on an international basis.
We will spend, in total $4.48 billion in aid and economic assistance. This amounts to only 0.0362% of our GDP on aid, compared to 0.5% for Sweden, 0.19% for the UK and even lower than the 0.125 for Ireland. Atlasia ranks apallingly low in the league table of international aid.
Furthermore with less than $325 million to spend on development assistance, particularly in countries such as Iraq we are seriously undermining our international effectiveness. We may be in serious danger of eating into our embassy security budget simply to keep Afghanistan ticking over and stopping it from slipping into civil war. We cannot maintain 100% funding in these areas and we are in danger of jeopardising our troops, our aid workers, our support staff and every Atlasian on Afghan soil.
We should not be in the business of shifting numbers about from department to department to make up for shortfalls in federal spending, neither would I like to see cuts in federal services in order to provide us with financial assistance.
President Ebowed has enacted an executive order to establish GiftAid, pledging the government to match a degree of private donations. Furthermore it is recommended that our aid funding should, in part, be split from the State Dept Budget in a new semi-independent organisation known as AtlasiAid so that the State Department is more effective in delivering and funding both aid and embassy services.
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