Letters | 17 January 2013

Aid waste

Sir: In Andrew Mitchell’s response to my article ‘The Great Aid Mystery’ (5 January), he asks ‘what about the 11 million children in school who wouldn’t be there’ if it weren’t for DFID’s aid efforts. It would be hard to come up with a more representative example of the dishonest marketing rhetoric that is the standard aid industry response to outside questioning. Not only is there the inevitable reference to children, there’s also a classic bogus statistic. Yes, the British government may have paid for 11 million school places over the years, but even if DFID had proof that 11 million real children were genuinely enrolled in schools as a result of UK aid (itself a dubious claim), that does not mean that they actually attend those schools, or that the schools have teachers, or textbooks, or electricity, or are more than half-built wrecks. Mr Mitchell is either deliberately stretching the truth in this claim, or he knows startlingly, dismayingly little about the realities of aid delivery.