Irish Independent, 16th November 2009

IN the theatre of war against human suffering there can be no white flags. The temptation to raise them would be too strong as the forces ranged against you are always overwhelming. Every disaster zone would be littered with them. Field workers would be tripping over them. Besides, injustice inequality, poverty, sickness and corruption are no respecters of such niceties. 
In more than three decades working in the Developing World I have never known such challenges. It is a time where the focus has to be on marshalling scarce resources, and targeting areas where maximum impact can be achieved. 

There are one billion people at this moment who are in danger of starvation on our planet. For aid workers and world governments alike, necessity has made the picture less cluttered; the objective could not be clearer. Instead of being defeatist in the face of an economic hurricane we have to do more, with less. That is why those of us who campaign for a better deal for the poor must show we can walk the walk and not just talk. 

Projects have to deliver because there is no cavalry coming over the hill to the rescue. Hearts and minds must concentrate on the fact that apart from the physical agonies the starving endure there is the emotional trauma.

Who knows the silent agonies of a mother who lies down at night with her babies in the certain knowledge that not all of them will survive to see the morning? Every day 26,000 children die in the Developing World from hunger and preventable illness.

Such is the grim framework within which governments across the globe must base their decisions when it comes to making aid cuts. Like death and taxes, cuts have tragically also become a certainty.  Our own Government’s hand has also been forced in this regard.  The aid money given to implementing agencies and missionaries is used to ease their suffering and save life. Yet, so far €255m has been removed from the aid budget. 

While cuts have become a fact of life in the recession they could all too easily become a fact of death in the Developing World if they are not targeted and weighed with the utmost care; after all,  lives are in the balance; lives that are already only hanging on by a fraying thread.  
GOAL accepts the inevitability of cuts, as all aid agencies must. The economists tell us that radical surgery is needed and that no sector can escape the scalpel. The impoverished have no fat and every cut goes straight to the bone, so when aid is being allocated it is now a matter of urgency that it goes to the implementing sectors, the NGOs and missionaries who deliver at the coal face. 
Not all money spent in the Developing World goes directly to the poor.

There is a savage injustice being visited on the poor which must be alleviated. The hideous black hole of corruption is swallowing more than €150bn annually. World governments have a moral responsibility to take every step possible to route aid through transparent channels, where oversight and implementation can be guaranteed. 

With so much pressure on funds spending on committees, conferences, symposiums, fact finding missions etc, must stop. These gobble up money that could be used to help the marginalised who are left totally naked and abandoned in the downturn. 

Those with a proven track record of delivering for the poor are the ones who must be tasked with helping them survive. Value for money has to be the imperative that informs all decisions on allocations. It is easy to forget that the work done by NGOs is utterly indispensable. We are the emergency services. No international government in the Developed World would dare tell its people that it is planning to axe the budget for ambulances and care for the dying, yet that is the effect that the financial meltdown has had in the Developing World. 

We recently saw the terrifying ordeal two GOALies were forced to endure to see that vital care is given. Sharon Commins and Hilda Kawuki worked in a war-torn region of Darfur where thousands of people depend on us to survive. With the vital assistance of Irish Aid thousands of people have benefited from health and nutrition programmes.  Our intervention is critical.

 The concern is that internationally, leaders have become insular and have lost sight of their moral compass allowing themselves to be swayed by short-term domestic political goals at the risk of doing serious long term damage.  In the West, the downturn demands that we adapt. In the Developing World there is no room to adapt, life is stark, you survive or you don’t - aid is the life support that enables millions to do so.

One is mindful of the fact that the Government is grappling with grave difficulties; but these must be kept in perspective in relation to the indignities and deprivations endured by the destitute. Like all other NGOs, aid cuts have sorely impacted on GOAL. We have had to pull our GOALies out of the Congo, and hundreds of thousands of the poor now must go without essential assistance. Virtually all of our programmes have been hit hard. But the Congo, Niger and Kenya have borne the brunt of the hardship.

What is required is not surrender or a walking away from the field, but a bold new focus and resolve to do things better with a total concentration of effort and resources.    
There is a battle to make the books balance, but budget issues, however important, and life saving require different priorities. Compassion demands that the lives of the poor must not be the hidden cost of economic reform.

© 2009 The Irish Independent