Financing development projects

Providing capital for development
Funding development projects

Implementation

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in close cooperation with over 170 member states and other UN agencies, designs and implements projects for agriculture, industry, education and the environment. It supports more than 5,000 projects with a budget of $1,300 million (1994). It is the largest multilateral source of grant development assistance. The World Bank, at the forefront in mobilizing support for developing countries worldwide, has alone loaned $333,000 million of development projects in the period 1946 to 1994.

The UNESCO Co-Action Programme provides aid to a number of projects in developing countries, conceived and carried out by local leaders at the community level. Generally the projects are submitted either through national commissions for UNESCO or through international non-governmental organizations. Priority is given to projects in the least developed countries and to those aimed at the most disadvantaged groups: women, the physically disabled and refugees. Each year about 75 projects on the average receive financial assistance from the Co-Action Programme thanks to voluntary contributions. The Programme provides liaison between projects and donors for whatever period is required.

Claim

A new and strengthened institutional structure is needed to intermediate funds from capital surplus to capital deficit countries, since the 1990s experiment with rapid and ideologically driven interfacing of capital markets with the developing world has proved to be very dangerous. The IMF and the World Bank are the most logical intermediaries – but under new management. The IMF must get back to objectively policing the international monetary system without unduly favouring private capital; and the World Bank must start acting like the long-term development-funding institution it was constituted as, rather than meekly relinquishing that task to providers of private capital who have proved incapable of taking more than a short-term and bottom line-oriented view of development.