The last decade has been boom time for the aid business.

Money and resources have poured in. Britain now proudly claims to be the second-largest overseas aid donor in the world, behind only the United States.

The amount of money and its “successes” are impressive. The chosen vehicle for Britain’s “fight against world poverty” is the Department for International Development (DfID), which enjoys an almost semi-autonomous role within the Government.

DfID, which was set up in 1997 after Labour came to power, now has an annual budget of £5.3 billion. By 2010 this will have risen to £7.9 billion. The Department has a total staff of 2,446 — who are often recruited from outside the traditional British civil service.

Partly as a result of Tony Blair’s messianic zeal, much of the money has gone to Africa, where many embassies and high commissions have changed beyond recognition. They are now dominated by DfID staff and their fleets of new cars emblazoned with its logos and slogans. “They have the money and the programmes and they call the shots,” a recently retired ambassador told The Times.

But he also accused them of naivety when dealing with Africa’s notoriously venal leaders, dragging Britain into unhealthily close relations with countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda, which have poor governance records.

“We are constantly faced with pulling the plug on our own programmes or holding our noses and staying in . . . The host governments know that perfectly well — but DfID types say you can’t make poor people suffer more for the fault of their governments. That is oversimplistic.”

In 2005, DfID suspended direct budget support to Ethiopia after its Government shot dead opposition protestors, but it carried on giving £130 million directly to aid programmes via local authorities so that the beneficiaries would not suffer. Ethiopia, which faces a new food crisis, has received an additional £22 million in emergency support since January.

“I simply do not see how the Government can claim this was a rap on the knuckles,” the former diplomat added.

The entire GDP of Sierra Leone — ranked the poorest country in the world in the latest world index — is currently put at £400 million. At present it receives ten per cent of that, or £40 million a year, from DfID despite frequent and mounting concerns of high-level corruption.

DfID maintains that its aid helps millions of the world’s poorest to survive and even move out of poverty altogether, and that the Government is honouring international commitments to increase aid. Britain spends 0.5 per cent of national income on aid and is committed to meeting the UN’s target of 0.7 percent by 2013 — ahead of the agreed European Union date of 2015.

Douglas Alexander, the International Development Secretary, said recently: “Every year our aid helps to lift around 3 million people permanently out of poverty and empowers poor countries to provide basic services such as health and education.”

In the last 10 years, DfID sources say, British aid has put 28 million children into primary school, trained hundreds of nurses in Malawi, provided basic water and sanitation in Ethiopia, and fought HIV/AIDs across Africa and Asia.

Much of this is true, but a growing band of sceptics say it tells only half the story.

Many nurses trained in Malawi, where there is a severe shortage, ended up coming to work in the National Health Service. DfID then ended up financing a scheme to pay them better wages at home. The “brain drain” was reduced, but is still high.

In Uganda and Mozambique, DfID trumpets its success in increasing hugely the number of girls enrolled in primary school. Much less noise, however, is made about the fact that fewer than 30 percent make it all the way through the system. “They drop out for reasons of poverty — that makes it all the more necessary to eliminate poverty,” a senior department official said.

Critics say, however, that it is precisely the money lavished on some of the most incompetent governments in the world which prevents them taking measures for higher economic growth.

Nicholas Oppenheimer, Africa’s richest man and the chairman of De Beers, recently told The Times that the aid approach was in fact an obstacle to growth. “Far from making poverty history, a reliance on aid has too often guaranteed poverty’s survival and done nothing for development or democracy.”

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