Storms in Madagascar provide an added opportunity for embezzlement in education. Photo: lefthandrotation (flickr)

Mismanagement and corruption continue to hinder the progress of education in Africa, suggests a recent Transparency International report on primary education in several African countries. The report cites several examples where local officials wasted the funds of school systems, which raised the costs that parents were forced to pay.

One of more outrageous examples of such corruption came from Madagascar, where school officials use the annual cyclone season as an opportunity to embezzle funds. A Space for Transparency blog explained how they do it:

Every year the coastal areas, mainly in the north eastern part of the island, face an onslaught from seasonal cyclones. First warnings usually start airing on TV and radio a few days before the cyclone hits, which gives people time to put their corruption scams into action. It works like this: when the cyclone is confirmed, the person in charge of school procurements pays a local merchant to fabricate an invoice for school supplies. The wind and rains come and lo and behold the school storage room is inundated with water and all the supplies are damaged. The school then submits a reimbursement claim to the central emergency fund for school materials. It explains how the storage room roof leaked and the supplies were ruined. The fake invoice is included in the claim.

As the World Bank points out, It is particularly important to address such practices in primary schools because education is the key to achieving other development goals. If poor kids are to have a chance at getting the education that could help them lift themselves out of poverty, a strong start in primary school is imperative.

China's attitude towards Africa was apparent in a slogan at a summit on Africa in Beijing. Photo: stephenrwalli (flickr)

Deborah Brautigan doesn't argue with critics who call China's interest in Africa self-serving. But she may be one of the first American academics to declare that China's deeds will be good for Africa, too.

It's an argument she expands in The Dragon's Gift, a new book analyzing the development of China's Africa policies over the last few decades.

Brautigan asserts that China's investments are integrating African countries into the global economy more quickly because, unlike Western countries, the nation invests in an array of industries. In Angola, for example, China has built roads, schools, hospitals, and irrigation systems in the country's interior — even though its oil wealth is far offshore. Brautigan also cites a telling remark by a Nigerian diplomat: "The Chinese are trying to get involved in every sector of our economy. If you look at the West, it's oil, oil, oil and nothing else."

And on a continent rife with corruption, China's style of development actually leaves less room for embezzlement than does the World Bank model, points out a book review in The Morning Star. Rather than funneling money through potentially corrupt government officials, China pays Chinese companies to head up infrastructure projects.

Brautigan acknowledges that China's behavior in Africa is sometimes far from saintly. Some have complained that Chinese companies do not respect local labor laws, as happened at a mine in Congo, and others worry that Chinese companies will have a negative environmental impact on the continent.

While not negligible, Brautigan sees these violations as small in comparison to what China's investments could mean for Africa, and in comparison to the failed promise of other foreign aid there. As an AidWatchers review noted, this "book seeks to compare Chinese aid to Western aid as it really is, not as we wish it were."

The neglect of an Indian complaint box: Fighting corruption requires active prevention measures. Photo: watchsmart (flickr)

It's known, but not talked about: Sometimes humanitarian aid doesn't make it into the hands of those who need it. Why? Because small-scale local corruption can siphon off money or goods, make aid agencies run less efficiently, or even exploit those who are dependent on such assistance.

A new handbook produced by Transparency International aims to help aid agencies reduce the risk of corruption. Its concrete suggestions cover the mundane, the profane, and everything in between — from how to tell if local staff might be driving agency vehicles outside of work to how to ensure that aid recipients aren't sexually abused by humanitarian workers.

The report offers some overarching suggestions, too: Aid agencies must plan ways to combat corruption in disaster zones before such calamities strike, not afterwards. Over the long term, they must get to know local culture and power structures well, since that is often the key to recognizing sources of malfeasance.

The handbook's recommendations have come just in time to be useful in Haiti, a senior Transparency International Advisor told AlertNet:

It's what I'd call a perfect storm for high corruption risk: you have a seriously damaged institutional infrastructure, a country with endemic corruption, a weak or fragile state in the best of circumstances and sudden influxes of huge amounts of resources to a highly vulnerable population.

Such a report cannot be taken seriously enough.

In 1978, the poor West African country of Liberia borrowed $6 million from a New York bank. The Liberian government promised to use the money to buy and develop an oil refinery, and to pay the money back in seven years.

Today it's not clear if either of those things ever happened.

Two years after the loan, the Liberian government was overthrown in a coup, which later led to a 14-year civil war. Meanwhile, the loan was bought and sold several times, according to allAfrica.com.

But now two investment funds say they hold the note and are entitled to $20 million from the current government of Liberia — a claim upheld by a London court. Today Liberia is led by a democratic government whose president is working with the IMF and World Bank to settle old debts. The Guardian says Liberia struck deals with most of its private-sector creditors, but these two funds are refusing to settle, demanding full payment through the courts.

A representative for the Jubilee Debt Campaign, a coalition fighting for debt relief for the world's poorest countries, accuses funds like these of "profiting from poverty."

As Al-Jazeera's Barbara Serra reports:

So-called vulture funds have been condemned by several governments for preying on the world's poorest states. They buy up the debt of near-bankrupt nations at a cheap price from financial institutions. They then sue those nations in international courts for the full value of the debt, plus steep levels of interest and penalty charges. Every year, developed countries spend billions of dollars to help pay off the debts of poorer nations, but vulture funds siphon off that money for themselves.

Even the lawyer for Liberia says this is a moral issue as well as a legal one. Get the full scoop from this Al-Jazeera video:

Severe unemployment threatens security gains made in the last few years. Photo: Dogon56 (flickr)

Security in Iraq is undoubtedly improving, but rising unemployment threatens to increase instability and worsen corruption, according to Iraq expert Frank Gunter.

Gunter, who's done two tours in Iraq as an economics adviser, points out in a recent op-ed in the New York Times that 51 percent of the population — and an even greater percentage of young people — is either unemployed or underemployed.

Almost half of the country’s labor force is paid by the government from its revenues from petroleum exports. With the exception of agriculture, legitimate private-sector employment is small — by my calculations, about 6 percent of the labor force. Most of the remainder of the Iraqi labor force is either unemployed or working in the underground economy.

Gunter further laments that any business faces either the inefficiencies of the underground economy or the corrupt ministries that regulate them. (Iraq was just listed among the top five most corrupt countries in the world.) The process to register a new business is expensive and complicated — a license costs $2,800 and requires approval from 12 different ministries.

"The potential for private sector job growth is great," Gunter writes. So what needs to be done? The number-one thing, Gunter says, is to make it easier and less expensive to register a new business. He also recommends that provinces, rather than Baghdad, set rules for regulating businesses.

But whatever is decided, the government of Iraq is running out of time. It must either end its hostility toward private businesses — or accept that a sharply growing mass of unemployed will nullify the progress of the last three years.

Transparency International's 2009 Corruption Perception Index is out. Where does your country rank?

Afghanistan is facing a dangerous new threat, but it does not involve suicide bombers or roadside explosives.

As the Washington Post reports, government corruption is threatening to topple Afghanistan’s fledgling democracy in the wake of a presidential election plagued by delayed vote tallies and reports of voter intimidation. The Wall Street Journal explains that corruption in Afghanistan is so pervasive that the United States and its allies are reconsidering their strategy in dealing with President Hamid Karzai. Allegations of misconduct are so prevalent that the U.S. has begun to view Karzai not as an ally, but as a liability in their effort to reconstruct the war-torn nation.

USAID recently released a report that said roughly two-thirds of Afghans had been victimized by a corrupt government official — the highest level ever recorded. In a country where the average person makes $700 a year, it takes a $400 bribe to be connected to the electrical grid.

If it's allowed to continue unchecked, the report says, corruption will make it impossible for Afghanistan to develop an economy capable of attracting foreign investment and aid.

Despite the obstacles to eliminating corruption, one organization has begun to make headway. The Christian Science Monitor reports how a multinational relief effort called the Aga Khan Development Network has begun to train Afghan villagers in basic accounting techniques. The villagers — who are now able to audit their community’s financial records — are better able to prevent embezzlement and theft. While the organization's efforts have so far met with success, they're only one soldier in the fight against a serious problem.

Tourists snap photos of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow, Russia. Photo: Fenst (flickr)

A major objective of Global Envision is to explore the relationships between market economies and poverty alleviation. I founded Global Envision because of my own experiences in developing countries where I saw economic development working to create wealth and benefit the people in both Latvia and Poland. These countries had previously been behind the iron curtain and part of the communist world. I have a strong belief that the failure of communism as an economic strategy is testimony to the superiority of a market oriented approach. Consequently, it was with great anticipation that I set out on a trip to visit Russia two weeks ago. I wanted to see what Russia looks and feels like today. What I learned was different from what I expected.

Starting in late July 2009, my wife and I embarked on our first visit to Russia. We were to spend four days in St. Petersburg, five days on the waterways towards Moscow, and three more in Moscow. All of it was on a ship which gave us a single base for the experience. We saw not only the two major cities of Russia but some smaller cities and a couple of villages.

This will not be a travel log, but rather a summary of what I learned about the economic and social changes that have taken place in Russia over the last twenty years. This is based on what I observed and what I heard from the several guides and lecturers that spent the two weeks with us.

It seems that the majority of people in Russia today favor what they had before to what they have today. While a recent poll indicated that 77 percent of Russians acknowledge that the freedom that they have today is a great improvement and to be cherished, they focus more on the lack of a significant safety net. They point to the great disparity between the rich and the poor and the fact that the poor were taken better care of in the past. Until we heard this expressed many times we would not have anticipated it, because what we saw in the streets, particularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow, appears to indicate significant prosperity. There are lots of products on the store shelves, both necessities and very extravagant things. BMW, Lexus, Tiffany and other luxury brands, are prevalent in Moscow. There is a fair amount of new construction of homes, businesses and offices. There appeared to be a great disparity between what we were being told and what we observed. Is a more market based economy helping the Russian people to prosper or is it hurting them?

The answer appears to be that it has benefited a small group immensely but not done much for the majority. Why hasn’t the movement towards a market economy been more generally effective? How they got from where they were twenty or so years ago with virtually no private ownership and an economy run by the government, to one where private ownership prevails was very poorly navigated. They distributed vouchers, worth 10,000 Rubles to the citizens, which they could use however they chose. But there was no education about what the options might be. One of our lecturers, who seemed to be a rational man, said that he ended up selling his voucher to a man for a single U.S. dollar. In the end, the vouchers ended up in the hands of a limited number of folks, who, along with the managers of the state owned businesses, and others in places of power in the bureaucracy, created an oligarchy that controls the government and the economy to this day.

Theoretically, they have a market economy and some small businesses can be started up. But bureaucracy and corruption are so prevalent that I don’t think that people have the sense that they can really participate in the economy. The few in power make it so difficult for others to become entrepreneurs that it isn’t even something that they think about. Opportunities are so limited that they are forgotten.

What they do see and seem to focus on is the impact of all this on the poor, especially older people. There is not much of a social safety net, and those who would have been taken care of under the prior system are struggling under the present one.

Another factor that seems to have a significant impact on why the majority favors the old system over the new one is the disintegration of the Soviet Union. When the cold war was going on the Soviet Union was clearly one of the two super powers in the world. When that all fell apart, starting with the declarations of independence by the Ukraine and Belarus, the position of Russia in the world is not nearly as important. Russians are a proud people and this loss of respect is deeply felt. While this major change in their world is not directly related to the change in their economic system it does seem to impact the majority’s preference for the old over the new.

It was a disappointment to me to learn that the potential for a free market to benefit their country and all of their people does not appear to be seen by most people in Russia today. As is true for all countries, what the situation is today is not fixed. It is obvious to me that Russia is still in a period of major flux and it could move towards more favorable opportunities for their people in the future. However, from all that I have learned, I am not very optimistic.

Has Kosovo's first year of independence truly been "totally successful," as Prime Minister Hasim Thaci asserts?

Nearly half of all Kosovars live in poverty, and there are only enough jobs for one out every two people.

Kosovo's economy is heavily dependent on remittances from abroad and foreign aid, two income sources expected to decline given the global financial crisis. And the foreign investment promised by the government has yet to materialize.

There remains untapped potential in the mining industry. Geologists recently discovered vast amounts of high-quality lignite coal (up to 15 billion tons) and considerable nickel, lead, zinc and bauxite deposits, and traces of gold.

But you have to wonder who would want to invest in any industry in a country ranked in the top fifth of the world’s most corrupt countries by Transparency International. Then there's the the threat of the mob. The UN mission in Kosovo estimates organized crime to account for some 15-20 percent of Kosovo's economy.

"For 10 years we linked every problem to status," said Shpend Ahmeti, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Pristina, referring to Kosovo's struggle to separate from Serbia. "We thought independence was going to simplify things. It has not. Independence has removed a mental block among Kosovars. Now, in every poll, the priority is not status, but jobs. We've moved from survival, to development and prosperity as a great need we don't yet have."

The "cancer of corruption" is rampant in poor countries and needs to become a social priority, development economist Ajit Mishra writes in Forbes.

Corruption, or abuse of public office for private gain, hurts the poor and undermines anti-poverty programs, Mishra reports from India. In corrupt societies, poor people are cut off from aid and access to public goods like water, health care, credit and education.

Payments have been made for non-existent public works, money has been disbursed to fictitious (sometimes long dead) persons, employed persons are paid only a fraction of the stipulated wage with the rest being appropriated by officials. This is not an isolated example; anti-poverty programs around the world have encountered similar problems. In some cases, the leakage from corruption can be as high as 80 percent.

Mishra says laws to curb corruption have proven ineffective, and that without methods to apprehend and punish corrupt officials, the growth potential of poor countries will continue to be severely inhibited.

Kyrgyzstan's Toktogul Reservoir is the country's largest source of hydroelectric power. Photo: Andrei Shevelov.com (flickr)

After months of forced power blackouts, Kyrgyzstan’s residents are bracing for the cold winter months ahead — and are turning the heat on their government to stop the cutoffs.

With its high-peaked mountain landscape, the former Soviet republic relies on glacial melt to generate hydroelectric power, its main energy source.

Kyrgyz officials have rationed electricity since April, blaming the region's semi-drought and an an unseasonably cold spring that did not melt enough mountaintop snow to refill the reservoirs. The latest UN appeal for humanitarian aid in Kyrgyzstan backs this claim.

Some residents hesitate to blame Mother Nature for the crisis, pointing instead to poor government management.

"We don't live like this, this is Bishkek," a young woman in the cosmopolitan capital told Eurasia.net during a period of blackouts. "We believe this is caused by corruption."

The World Bank's Raghuveer Sharma calls the situation a result "not only of a period of water shortage, but also of poor management of the sector, or rather of the water resources that Kyrgyz energy depends on."

The Kyrgyz government is responding to the criticism, making sure power was restored in Bishkek and firing the country's energy minister in late November. But blackouts are continuing in rural areas — sometimes up to eight or ten hours per day. And the energy sector of the government says it will continue to ration electricity through the peak winter heating season.

While the cold may not be as bad this year as last year, electricity stoppages will create much more suffering, especially in urban or semi-urban areas where residents have less access to natural fuel sources, says Kevin Grubb, former Kyrgyzstan deputy country director for Mercy Corps. Grubb, who lived in Kyrgyzstan in 2006 and 2007, says, "More people among the vulnerable populations will die from exposure — as we saw to some degree last year — especially among the elderly and poor, and newborns and infants."

Even before the coldest months arrive, local businesses say they've already been crippled by the outages. "All manufacturing depends on electricity, so everyone has suffered," political analyst Syrgak Abdyldaev told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting. "The rolling power cuts are increasing the level of discontent among all social strata, and there are more and more unhappy people."

It's children like these girls that may never recieve the free medicine from aid groups like Unicef, because of the thriving black market. Photo: Travlr (flickr)

BBC investigative reporter Sorious Samura uses a hidden camera to confront pharmacists selling Unicef-provided drugs distributed by Unicef in Sierra Leone. The drugs were intended to be distributed free of charge. When he tries to ask citizena how the pharmacists could sell medicines intended to be distributed for free, they appear confused: “We don’t have any medicine that is free here.”

This is one instance of corruption that Samura cites in his accompanying opinion piece raising questions about the value of aiding Africa and how much corruption distorts the good intentions of donors.

The endangered mountain gorilla calls the Virunga National Park in the DRC home. Unfortunately so do soldiers, poachers and the illegal charcoal trade. Photo: Ramon Azofra (flickr)

It was about this time last year when four gorillas were murdered in cold blood in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

A photo of the 530-pound Senkwekwe, head of the massacred gorilla family, being carried to burial by Congolese villagers, ignited international outrage and garnered the public’s attention, if only for a moment. Almost a year later, National Geographic has published a magnificent piece examining the gorilla murders in the Virunga National Park.

Poachers were quickly dismissed as suspects due to the intact remains of the animals, leaving soldiers from the Congolese military or two other rebel factions as the likely culprits. Soldiers on all sides of the conflict have wreaked havoc on local communities, killing indiscriminately and raping women, including children as young as three years old. Despite such acts, soldiers insist they are under strict instructions not to harm the gorillas.

So who — or what — explains the murders?

"Follow the trail of charcoal," Emmanuel de Merode had said at the WildlifeDirect office. "Charcoal is the biggest threat to the park."

Charcoal, as we discover over the next few days, is the main source of energy, and evil, in North Kivu. Charcoal is used by 98 percent of the households for cooking, boiling water to make it potable, and also for heat. In the city of Goma, a constant pall of charcoal smoke smudges out the sun and makes the rough streets, rumpled with hardened lava from the 2002 eruption of Nyiragongo, appear to be pathways to hell.

Hardwood charcoal is the economic prize in the DRC and it comes from old growth hard wood trees found within Virunga National Park — home to half the world's population of mountain gorillas.

A sack of charcoal sells for $25 on average. Doing the math De Merode estimates that in 2006, when gorilla tourism brought in less than $300,000, the Virunga charcoal industry was worth more than $30 million.

It is estimated that at the rate that charcoal is harvested from the park, the entire southern portion of the park will be gone in ten years. An area considered to be perhaps the most biologically diverse and best of its kind, may soon vanish.

Aware of these facts, and the local implications, neighboring Rwanda has banished the internal production of charcoal. However, this approach does nothing to mitigate Rwanda's own internal demand for the product. They just buy it from the Congolese.

But what does this have to do with the death of four gorillas in July 2007?

Writer Mark Jenkins met with Paulin Ngobobo, chief warden of the Virunga National Park, to hear his story. When Ngobobo worked for the National Parks he quickly realized that all sides were profiting from the charcoal trade, from the Congolese military to Hutu militias and local chiefs — even the park rangers. In a struggle for conservation of the gorilla's home, he realized that the charcoal trade had to be stopped in its tracks.

At this point Paulin Ngobobo was detained and beaten, allegedly by men directed by the former chief park warden, Honoré Mashagiro, who was actively involved in the very trade which was destroying the park he was charged with protecting. To discredit Ngobobo's anti-charcoal trade efforts it is alleged that Mashagiro had the gorillas killed and blamed their murders on Ngobobo. Despite Mashagiro's efforts, Ngobobo has been cleared of the accusations and remains free. Mashagiro, on the other hand, has been imprisoned in Goma and awaits trial for the killings of the Virunga mountain gorillas.

The story of the DRC's illegal charcoal trade is a difficult one. Who is to blame? A culture of corruption which ensures that park rangers and soldiers will smuggle charcoal to supplement a non-existent salary? Citizens of Goma and neighboring Rwanda who demand the charcoal for cooking?

One thing is for sure: along with peace, the DRC is also in desperate need of alternative energy sources.

Photo: Michael Foley Photography (flickr)

Pouring aid money into Afghanistan seems to be like pouring water into a sieve?

For a country that has received billions of dollars in international assistance since 2002, some may be surprised to hear that many Afghans still don't have access to clean drinking water, sewage systems, electricity.

As of this year, the World Bank says "only 13% of Afghans have access to safe drinking water, 12% to adequate sanitation, and just 6% to electricity."

"What puzzles poorer Afghans," writes a BBC correspondent, "is why so many basic problems haven't been solved, despite the billions of dollars of international aid."

So, where has the billions of aid dollars gone?

One Afghan schoolteacher told BBC to look at the lavish lifestyle of corrupt officials. "Go and see who owns these expensive houses in (the suburb of) Wazir Akbar Khan and who is driving land cruisers," he says. "Karzai should ask these officials how they got so rich overnight, instead of making empty promises again and again."

Afghanistan is considered one of the world's most corrupt countries. It ranked 172 out of 179 countries last year on Transparency International's corruption-perceptions index.

Karzai's government insists they're trying to tackle corruption, but, as this Q&A between BBC.com readers and Afghan villagers reveals, people still feel like this government is letting them down.

Many, including Afghanistan's former NATO commander, think the country still risks becoming a failed state. U.S. Presidential candidate Barack Obama called Afghanistan's situation "precarious and urgent" during a high-profile visit there last week.

But perhaps addressing that urgency requires a different tack. Oxfam America issued a call on Saturday, timed to coincide with Obama's visit, for overhauling U.S. assistance to Afghanistan. "In particular," they said, "the U.S. should spend less on achieving short-term measures of success using costly consultants who are hamstrung by security constraints, and find more creative and sustainable ways to deliver the long-term development and security that Afghans really need."

A recent development in oil-rich Nigeria has all but been overlooked in recent news coverage as the violence in Kenya continues to garner most media attention. The forced leave of absence of an anti-corruption chairman in Nigeria could lead to tensions and international implications similar to those unfolding in Kenya.

Nigeria's failure to encourage positive and widespread development is often attributed to heavy corruption within its governing bodies. Corruption is blamed for the loss of millions in oil revenues; money that is critical for the country to address issues like rampant poverty and a failing infrastructure. Nigeria has great potential to be a positive model for other African countries in the area of international trade and population management. Its success in these areas, though, are directly linked to whether or not Nigeria can curb its corruption problems.

Shock, outrage and, in some quarters, relief, greeted news that Nuhu Ribadu was being sent on a year-long training course in the midst of launching the biggest graft prosecutions ever seen in Nigeria, perhaps in Africa. Although far from universally popular, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) was credited with doing the most to bring some of the country’s hitherto untouchable politicians to book.