It’s difficult to assess the impact of development aid in 2010- there has been a lot going on. The Millennium Development Goal summit yielded little, except further confirmation that China and India have been the driving forces behind the majority of progress toward what MDGs may be achievable, and much of Sub-Saharan Africa has fallen, if possible, further behind. Most of development aid in 2010 was driven by major disasters such as the Haiti earthquake, and continuing focus on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Additionally, the financial crisis that rocked the world in 2010 prevented many Western countries from reaching their development aid pledges, much to the outrage of the developing world. A look back at some of the major events that directed foreign aid in 2010:
January: Haiti earthquake
February: Chile earthquake
April: China earthquake
July: Pakistan floods
November: G-20 summit in South Korea
(Not including major events like the World Cup, the Winter Olympics, the volcanic explosion in Iceland, Greek financial crash, coup d’etat in Niger, trapped Chilean miners, stampede in Cambodia, and plane crashes in Russia, Ethiopia, Libya, and Cuba)
It’s interesting to see how much of foreign aid was directed by natural disasters this year. We can only hope this won’t be the same in 2011, but it does illustrate one of the reasons why countries may have failed in fulfilling their pledges of “$X in aid”: something else occurs unexpectedly and all aid is diverted to deal with the crisis. Is this a trend? We’ll see. For the moment the world seems occupied with dealing with the WikiLeaks documents, hiding from their families during the holiday season or trying to escape the snowpocalypse that his crippled most of Europe. In January 2011, South Sudan will have its referendum – personally, I’m not predicting this to go particularly smoothly but I’m very interested to see how both that situation and the one in Cote d’Ivoire play out.
