UNESCO has put on hold the award of a prize for “improving the quality of human life” that is paid for and named after one of Africa's most authoritarian and corrupt rulers.

The prize is funded with a $3m donation from Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, president of Equatorial Guinea and a man regarded as having made a huge contribution to human misery as well as having curtailed more than a few lives.

Aimed at scientists, the prize, from the UN's scientific and cultural organisation, was to have been awarded this month but has been suspended following an international outcry.

Obiang, 68, is known not only for having had his predecessor executed, but for the arrest and torture of political opponents, and the plundering of his country's oil wealth while many live in poverty.

Equatorial Guinea's per capita income has risen a hundredfold in 20 years, to the highest in Africa, because of oil. But many of its 680,000 people survive on less than £1 a day. Life expectancy is 49 years.

The prize money was given to Unesco by the Obiang Nguema Mbasogo Foundation for the Preservation of Life. Human rights groups and anti-corruption organisations have accused Unesco of “laundering the reputation of a kleptocrat with an appalling human rights record”.

Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town and Nobel peace prize winner, said Unesco was “allowing itself to burnish the unsavoury reputation of a dictator”, and that the money Obiang pledged for the prize, to glorify himself, was taken from the people of Equatorial Guinea on whom it should now be spent.

Seven recipients of a Unesco prize for courageous journalists wrote to the organisation objecting to the Unesco Obiang Nguema Mbasogo international prize for research, which they said was named after “a leader who oppresses the media”.

The US ambassador to Unesco, David Killion, recently urged the organisation to suspend the award, in a belated show of disapproval of Obiang by Washington, which has generally overlooked the shortcomings of his rule since the discovery of oil in Equatorial Guinea.

Along with some other western nations, the US, which is the largest contributor to Unesco's budget, did not raise objections in April when a majority on the organisation's 58-nation board brushed aside protests at the award. African nations have supported Obiang over the prize.

Unesco's director-general, Irina Bokova, recently told the organisation's board that the awarding of the prize should be put on hold. “I have heard the voices of the many intellectuals, scientists, journalists, and of course governments and parliamentarians, who have appealed to me to protect and preserve the prestige of the organisation. I have come to you with a strong message of alarm and anxiety ... We must be courageous and recognise our responsibilities, for it is our organisation that is at stake.” A decision on the future of the prize will be taken at a board meeting in October.

Obiang's government has accused critics of “showing their true colonialist, discriminatory, racist and prejudiced identity, by not accepting that an African president can confer an award of this kind”.

A statement said “There exists a great deal of misperception about Equatorial Guinea, an issue that is partly our fault since we have not always responded to inaccuracies [in] the international press.”

Obiang seized power in 1979. When Equatorial Guinea was on the brink of becoming an oil-rich nation in the mid-1990s he promised it would be the Kuwait of Africa.

— The Guardian, Londonn