Landscape littered with good intentions

NAIROBI - The abandoned wrecks of well meaning aid projects are scattered across the African landscape, reminding people who walk past them every day that the foreigner's money does not always help.

In Nairobi, forlorn high rise buildings sit on the edge of Kibera, Africa's biggest slum where parts of The Constant Gardener were filmed.

With crumbling plasterwork, broken roofs and no windows, the buildings blight an already ugly street, where barefoot children play in open sewers and rubbish lies rotting at people's doorways.

A German charity put up the buildings in an attempt to solve Kibera's chronic housing shortage; space is at a premium in Nairobi, and the European well-wishers hoped that the slum dwellers would leave their corrugated iron shacks and move into the purpose-built blocks.

But this is Nairobi, and even though the flats themselves were safe and warm, the lifts frequently broke down and the local authorities never managed to provide electricity and water.

Within a few months, the slum dwellers decided that living in a corrugated shack was unpleasant, but it was better than traipsing up to a sixth floor flat in pitch darkness carrying several jerrycans of water twice a day. Quietly, without fanfare, the flats were abandoned, and no one provided the cash to tear them down.

A few hundred kilometres north, on the shores of Lake Turkana, the Norwegian Development Agency built a fish freezing plant in 1981 and then set about persuading 20,000 nomadic cattle herders to give up their livestock and become fishermen. Many did, just before a cyclical drought killed off more of the fish in 1984.

Any basic study of Lake Turkana's water levels would have shown that the lake dries up every few decades. The former cattle herders were left with no livelihood and a useless factory that needed expensive diesel power generators to run.

And even if the aid projects are properly thought out by the donors, the governments that receive the aid often do not have the will or ability to administer them properly.

In 1980, the World Bank lent the Tanzanian Government £22 million ($66 million) to open a shoe factory that was meant to sell millions of shoes to Europe.

It did not produce a single shoe but stayed open for 10 years, costing £277,000 a year to maintain. Finally, its managers admitted they could not find suitable shoe leather anywhere in Tanzania, and closed the plant.

In West Africa, in the 1970s, the United States Government spent US$10 million ($16 million) on a project to boost food production and marketing in the Mils Mopti region in Mali.

The money was meant to provide clean water and 18 warehouses. At the end of the project five of the planned warehouses were not built, three not finished, three had collapsed, two had their roofs blown off and three more simply crumbled. The Government had also spent US$4900 on a painting to illustrate the scheme. The auditors later found the painting at the project headquarters, out of the sight of any passing farmers, hanging in the lavatory.

- INDEPENDENT