CIDA's Net Failure

So many opinions swirl around about foreign aid that we sometimes don't know what to do when a clear success story hits us in the face.  So it is with malaria. Not so much a giant slayer as a baby killer, malaria kills over one million children a day and leaves many families devastated for a lifetime. I've struggled with it personally from the early-1970s since my sojourn in Bangladesh. Living with such a disease led me to agreeing to work with Belinda Stronach and Rick Mercer as a special ambassador for their Spread The Net program - an initiative designed to provide millions of treated bed-nets to families in Africa.The nets themselves have prompted a revolution, with clear results that are staggering. The new generation of netting costs only $10 for everything from purchasing, transport and disbursement. When the initiative began around 2000, its critics were legion, claiming that just providing nets for free would encourage waste and laziness. Instead, like Dambisa Moyo, they preferred that Africans should pay a token fee, say two dollars, so that they would learn to care for the nets better. It passes understanding how they could consider such an outlay when most Africans live on less than two dollars a day.In the end the critics were wrong - resoundingly so. Recently, the Poverty Action Lab at MIT carried out detailed experiments in Kenya that compared mass distribution with those initiatives that charged a small fee for malaria nets. They discovered a significant drop in the usage of nets if even a tiny charge was levied, whereas those given out in mass distribution were used, and more effectively. Furthermore, there was no greater wastage of nets with the "free" system as with the "pay" system.  The study concluded by affirming: "Free distribution is both more effective and more-cost effective than cost-sharing."  And so more and more groups have linked to this system, and where in 2004 people covered by the nets was 10 million, the figure in 2009 is 170 million.  Millions are now living that were bound for quiet and insufferable death. It is a story of a remarkable innovation in aid at a time when such successes are needed.And what is CIDA's part in this overall achievement? You needn't ask, because it's lost a glorious opportunity. Only a few months ago, CIDA pledged $20 million to distribute malaria nets. Sounds great until you learn that this is a $6 million cut from the previous funding of only three years ago and a long way from the $100 million the Canadian Red Cross requested. Considering the Agency's recent pullout of much of its development funding for Africa, perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised.Except that in providing so little leadership on the bed-net file, CIDA has actually denied its own history of successful intervention. Just prior to Stephen Harper's election victory in 2006, CIDA assisted with funds that eventually provided almost a million nets to Sierra Leone. They were distributed free to almost every child in one week and resulted in reduced malaria cases of 50% almost immediately. Put simply, CIDA saved lives - big time. Learning from that remarkable success, the Red Cross put in more funding proposals, but after 18 months in waiting, they received far less than they petitioned for. CIDA had already left the building.At a time when so many in Canada are losing faith in foreign aid to Africa, the arrival of the treated malaria nets should present a ray of hope and a reversal of fortune for CIDA itself. Instead, it missed the boat, and while other agencies seek to enlist Canadians in huge numbers to join the "net" campaigns, CIDA opted to move to the Americas. How could a CIDA-sponsored program of such great success not be built upon? Hundreds of international developments workers are still scratching their heads and, like the editorial published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, they agree that CIDA's neglect is "disturbing," and that the "indolence of the Canadian government is baffling and embarrassing." This is CIDA's net failure; they'll never build a domestic constituency if they can't even follow the interventions of average Canadians into Africa. Time to rethink.