What happens when aid is withdrawn from a state in political turmoil? | Global development | guardian.co.uk

Talata and Hanintsoa live three hours' drive apart. Both survive by eating leaves. Talata delights in Madagascar's succulent vegetation because she is a three-year-old babakoto lemur. Hanintsoa Rakotoarimanga less so; she is a 37-year-old former textile worker living in a city slum.

That the world should be mindful to preserve Talata's habitat is entirely right. But amid a grinding political crisis that has prompted international donors to withdraw from the Indian Ocean island, the diet available to Rakotoarimanga and her four children has steadily deteriorated. To feed them, she does other people's washing on the litter-layered banks of a stagnant river in the capital Antananarivo. For want of money to pay fees, she has taken her eldest child out of school.

Since independence from France in 1960, Malagasy governance has been about keeping the army on side. The international community tolerated the trend until the most recent coup, in March 2009, when President Marc Ravalomanana lost out to Antananarivo's baby-faced mayor, Andry Rajoelina.

In the collective finger-wagging exercise that ensued, international donors pulled the plug on aid which, until then, had provided 70% of the Malagasy public services budget. Britain cancelled debt relief, as did others. British aid to Madagascar fell from £15m ($24.5m) in 2007 to £2.5m ($4.1m) in 2010. The only safe aid now is that earmarked for conservation and this month the World Bank board is expected to give the go-ahead for a £37m ($60.5m) cash injection to an ongoing national parks programme.

Rakotoarimanga was not aid-dependent. She worked as a machinist in a Gap factory. ''For five years I had a job paying 10,000 ariary a day (£3, or $5),'' she says. "It was OK. But suddenly all the factories closed.'' At the end of 2009, President Barack Obama announced that products from undemocratic Madagascar were to lose their exemption from 34% US import duties under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). The closure of virtually all the textile factories around Antananarivo put 50,000 people out of work. An industry earning the country £400m ($654m) a year ceased to exist.

After twenty-six months of the Malagasy political crisis, amid an ongoing but as-yet fruitless mediation process by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a tiny new elite has emerged. But 80% of the population is classed as living in poverty. A household survey last year by the United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) found that aid sanctions are biting the wrong people: school enrolment has plummeted and health indicators are in decline. As the 2015 deadline for the millennium development goals approaches, Madagascar is way off target: 60% of rural people don't have use of a toilet, 45% of the population does not have ready access to drinking water. Only 12% of the population light their homes with lightbulbs and the inhabitants of a quarter of households don't go to sleep in a bed.

Unicef country representative Bruno Maes said the international community must rethink its aid sanctions and stop punishing the poorest people of Madagascar for the sins of the political elite. ''In the health sector alone the government managed to disburse only two dollars per capita in 2009, against eight dollars in 2008. The trend is the same in education. The pressure on families has become unbearable,'' he said.

Yet it needn't be so. Maes is among aid experts who praise the system put in place by the Department for International Development (DfID) in Zimbabwe. "It is true that the Zimbabwean crisis is older, so there has been time to explore options. But why not adapt the Zimbabwean model to Madagascar?'' While President Robert Mugabe and his military regime are under European and American sanctions, Britain gives about £70m ($115m) per year to Zimbabwe, which funds the public health system. Donor channels have been kept open by bypassing the government system through a protracted relief programme, an education transition fund and a multi-donor trust fund (the Zim Fund) through which all aid passes. The system is open to criticism, not least from Zimbabwe's reform-minded prime minister, Morgan Tsvangirai, who would like some foreign money to bolster the Treasury. The system also needs ongoing review, to avoid becoming a substitute for internal welfare efforts.

But at least, unlike Madagascar, the donors have not abandoned Zimbabwe's poorest people in the name of punishing the excesses of power-hungry politicians.

Until donors find a similar solution for Madagascar, life will be better for the endangered lemurs munching on Madagascar's trees than for women bringing up children on the streets of Antananarivo. They will end up eating the lemurs.

Posted by
Alex Duval Smith in Antananarivo Tuesday 7 June 2011 07.00 BST
guardian.co.uk

Madagascar descended into poverty when aid donors pulled the plug, but the Zimbabwean model shows there is another way

What happens when aid is withdrawn from a state in political turmoil? | Global development | guardian.co.uk: "What happens when aid is withdrawn from a state in political turmoil?"