October 17, 2008	Friday	Shawwal 17, 1429

LONDON, Oct 16: A National Audit Office (NAO) investigative report published on Thursday has found that millions spent by the Department for International Development (DFID) in developing countries and war zones like Afghanistan and Iraq have gone waste because of inefficient management and corruption.

The report said DFID-funded wells were running dry in Afghanistan because no geological surveys were carried out before they were built. The department spent £20m on an Afghan counter-narcotic programme over three years during which opium production continued to rise. Poor monitoring by DFID in Congo meant that bed nets given to pregnant women had not been treated with insecticide and, as a result, cases of malaria increased.

According to the NAO report, almost a quarter of DFID’s billion-pound conflict zone projects suffered from fraud and financial problems.

In Iraq, a £20 million project disappeared because of corruption as local officials massively overbilled the amount of work days.

In Afghanistan, it found that the DFID was failing to “achieve all or most of its objectives” in the region while, at the same time, there was “high staff turnover, limited experience and staffing gaps”.

The investigation found that although the department spent £256,000 per person of the staff it had based in Afghanistan, much of it going on providing security, many employees in the insecure countries considered that their posting was not “healthy and safe”. The dissatisfaction was highest among those involved with Nigeria (59 per cent), Afghanistan (45 per cent) and the Congo (40 per cent).

One of the reasons for these failures is said to be bad staffing decisions. In Afghanistan, 50 per cent of the civil servants had not served overseas before and, of the rest, only 15 per cent had previously worked in an insecure area.

Some of the problems with DFID projects, said the report, were due to a lack of checks made on local partners in projects.

“Inadequate assessment of partners left unidentified gaps in the capacity to deliver,” the report concludes. “Which in turn has hampered DFID’s ability to spend its funds and therefore reduce impact on the ground.”

DFID’s aid work has come in for criticism in Afghanistan, in particular, from British military commanders who have charged that failure to provide viable reconstruction projects have made it more difficult to win over the population in Helmand.