Till Bruckner of the Transparency International asked for information on US Aid expenditures in the Republic of Georgia. Instead of a transparent documents showing how money is spent, Till instead received documents with many blacked out pages. Some of what was blacked out detailed money granted to well known NGOs like World Vision, CARE and CNFA.
From his Aid Watch blog post, Till Buckner gives this run down on who had nothing to hide and who did not.
Perhaps surprisingly, the United Nations showed the highest consistent commitment to transparency. The budgets of the two UN agencies funded by USAID are both reproduced in full.
UMCOR, Mercy Corps, and AIHA emerge as the most transparent NGOs. These charities apparently felt that they had nothing to hide, and did not request USAID to black out any of the information contained in their budgets.
In contrast, Save the Children apparently asked USAID to withhold all information related to salaries. As even the aggregate subtotals for international and national staff have been blacked out, concerns about the privacy of individual staff members cannot have been the sole concern driving the organization’s response. Still, the fact that all non-salary related budget lines remain visible put Save the Children in the middle ground in terms of NGO transparency.
CARE’s response is harder to interpret as USAID inexplicably sent only an aggregated “summary budget” that leaves little to conceal. What information exists shows that CARE did not object to the release of unit prices for supplementary food items, or of aggregated staff and operational support costs. In contrast, CARE appears to regard its “indirect cost rate” and “cost share” as confidential. To hide this information, USAID also had to black out the budget’s bottom line, thus leaving unclear how many taxpayer dollars were handed over in total.
The least transparent NGOs in this test are CNFA, World Vision, and Counterpart International. They apparently requested that USAID black out all information in their budgets except for the grand total. Apparently, these NGOs consider budget items such as “office furniture” (CNFA), “visibility items (t-shirts, caps, publications)” (World Vision) and “forklift expenses” (Counterpart) as confidential information whose release could cause them substantial competitive harm.
2 comments:
Sleeping in the same bed with AEI makes for strange bedfellows for a whistle blower against USAID abuses
The underlying motivations are not crystal clear, why a lone scholar like Till Bruckner, accruing a long list of enemies who label him a whistle blower with an axe to grind against USAID lack of even basic transparency. Till Bruckner, whose name cannot pull up much at all on Google unrelated to this new polemic emerging circa April 2010, sprang out of nowhere to bemoan the lack of transparency that may be hiding corruption in USAID and their nongovernmental organization affiliates, including their religious aid networks, would pick the American Enterprise Institute's magazine, THE AMERICAN, to lead the armada as a flagship into the murky waters of investigating the similarties between World Food Program and USAID, which may itself today have grown to be a bloated behemoth of intelligence affiliates.
http://www.american.com/archive/2010/april/how-corrupt-is-the-world-food-program/?searchterm=till
The AEI is well known and notorious among its detractors for being the birthplace of hard core neo convervatism, which has been a frightful infestation of American democratic ideals and foreign policy for over 20 years now.
You may be thinking by now that I am a blind supporter of USAID and the black clouds of legitimate and illegitimate NGOs swarming around USAID and the Republic of Georgia like flies. On the contrary, I have been a long time investigative reporter dredging up such information for public disclosure for a few decades here in the Caucasus.
The author's motivations portrayed by some as purely PhD research is a mouthful to chew on and not choke. One can simply Google his mentors, allies, and affiliations and see that there is enough envy and jealousy of a vast rival power network to make an overflowing Georgian 'supra' table seem meager. USAID now eclipses the former glory of AEI and their tangled web of patronages.
Something akin to the legendary rivalry between the Templars and the Hospitallers during the Crusades is going on here, and I don't think i am the only muckracking hillbilly in these here hills that has noticed so effortlessly, do you?
And I question if the poor and needy of our planet, and their even more unfortunate brothers and sisters living under bloody repression, who truly need humanitarian aid and development assistance, would be impressed by this infighting and feuding squabble between two juggernauts who in the end will lay out very little for the poor themselves, and leave the recipients questioning the sincerity of the benefits coming from "the American People". Remember Katrina and Ward 9? Charity starts at home, as well as transparency.
I have to give Mr. Bruckner credit for coining one of the pithiest sentences i have read in a very long time, "Secrecy and charity make for strange bedfellows."
http://aidwatchers.com/2010/05/secret-ngo-budgets-publish-what-you-spend/
I absolutely agree, and whistle blowing against abuses of U.S. monies exemplified by USAID projects, makes strange bedfellows for AEI.
Jeffrey Silverman,
Freelance journalist and former Editor of Georgian Times, 18 years resident of Georgia, who has investigated corruption within USAID in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Afghanistan, in the last ten years.
The underlying motivations are not crystal clear, why a lone scholar like Till Bruckner, accruing a long list of enemies who label him a whistle blower with an axe to grind against USAID lack of even basic transparency. Till Bruckner, whose name cannot pull up much at all on Google unrelated to this new polemic emerging circa April 2010, sprang out of nowhere to bemoan the lack of transparency that may be hiding corruption in USAID and their nongovernmental organization affiliates, including their religious aid networks, would pick the American Enterprise Institute's magazine, THE AMERICAN, to lead the armada as a flagship into the murky waters of investigating the similarties between World Food Program and USAID, which may itself today have grown to be a bloated behemoth of intelligence affiliates.
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