IRELAND: Ireland boasts one of the highest-quality overseas aid programmes among Western donors, according to a new report.
Almost 90 per cent of Irish aid is "real aid" that benefits poor people in developing countries, the report by ActionAid finds.
In contrast, the agency accuses most Western countries of exaggerating their generosity by including such items as administration, technical assistance and debt relief in their official aid figures.
Such "phantom aid", as the agency describes it, accounts for two-thirds of aid spending by wealthy countries. While this aid may achieve other goals, it does not help to fight poverty, the report, Real Aid: An Agenda for Making Aid Work, says.
ActionAid says the worst offenders are large donors such as the US and France, where "phantom aid" accounts for more than 80 per cent of spending.
In 2003, official spending on aid by Western donors amounted to $69 billion, or 0.25 per cent of gross national income. However, ActionAid says $5 billion of this money was not targeted at poverty reduction, almost $10 billion was double-counted as debt relief, almost $14 billion comprised "overpriced and ineffective" technical assistance and almost $3 billion was tied aid.
And it says another $11 billion in aid was poorly co-ordinated or too unpredictable to be useful to the recipients or was spent on administration or immigration-related costs.
"'Real' aid does real good, and we need much more of it," said ActionAid policy officer Romilly Greenhill.
"The UN target is for donor countries to expend 0.7 per cent of their income on aid, but shamefully the G7 countries are only one-tenth of the way to that target when it comes to 'real' aid. If donors really want their aid to help people, they need to reach the 'real' 0.7 per cent target by 2010 at the latest."
The report finds that Ireland spends more of its aid (79 per cent) on low-income countries than any other country apart from Portugal. In contrast, the US spends only half its aid on these countries.
Ireland has no tied aid, whereas 70 per cent of US aid and 92 per cent of Italian aid is tied.
