Development without freedom: how aid underwrites repression in Ethiopia

For those who know Ethiopia this report will have come as no surprise. It will also have been no surprise to the various official donors, both bilateral and multilateral. What they won’t have liked is the publicity. During the period June to December 2009 Human Rights Watch (HRW) investigators interviewed over two hundred individuals in Ethiopia, including peasant farmers, kebele (village or neighbourhood) and woreda (district) officials, teachers, representatives of major donors and government officials. In the course of interviewing many who had been excluded from the benefits of five major projects, including the Protection of Basic Services and the Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), the investigators heard accounts of regular systematic political bias by officials which led to the exclusion from the programmes of many whose political views were not those of the ruling coalition party, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF); members of opposition political parties were particularly vulnerable. Many of those interviewed had been told that access to programme benefits was conditional on them joining the EPRDF or one of its member parties. Such microlevel incidence of exclusion and political pressure was, and is, possible because of EPRDF party influence throughout the local government system of kebeles which extends down to the smallest villages in the countryside and to local districts in towns and cities. HRW argues that donors are well aware of such abuses, a number of their representatives having spoken off the record, but they neither condemn them publicly nor introduce monitoring for political bias into their programmes. Most donors are reluctant to challenge the Ethiopian government on human rights issues. One suggested reason is the prioritisation given by donors to meeting the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs), where some progress in aggregate terms has indeed been made in Ethiopia, and that this has taken precedence over issues of human rights; hence HRW’s conclusion that it has been ‘development without freedom’. Following its investigation HRW sent a detailed letter to the Development Assistance Group via the Ethiopia Country Director of the World Bank summarising their findings and offering a number of proposals for donors to adopt to neutralise politicallybased exclusion in the provision of assistance to individuals and households. The published report reproduces the response from the Co-Chair of the Development Assistance Group (DAG) in Ethiopia, its detailed content perhaps reflecting the international standing which HRW has gained over the years while also engaging in a deflection exercise. The DAG response was not so much to refute the findings as to attempt to place them in a more positive context, assisted by an array of surveys and figures; one example being that 88% of households surveyed on the selection process for the PSNP found the process to be fair. On each side of such data gathering exercises, of course, there are uncertainties. In official surveys, for instance, how willing