Médecins Sans Frontières - AFGHANISTAN: 15 years of missed opportunities (INT)

Unique Identifier Code / URN MSF143322

Date taken / Date Recorded 18/03/2015 12:00 AM

Country Afghanistan

Commissioning section MSF-FRANCE

Copyright MSF

Usage Rights (MSF) Internal Use Only

Formal Consent Copy available no

Editor's rating ★★★★★ (C)

Video format h264 (Constrained Baseline) (avc1 / 0x31637661)

Duration 2m29s

Maximum Size 1920px × 1080px 144.04 MB

Additional Information / Shotlist AFGHANISTAN: 15 years of missed opportunities
MSF is working in a public hospital in Kabul, providing assistance to the nearby population, mostly ethnic Hazaras, a historically marginalised group of Shiite Muslims.
Roshan Kumarasamy, who recently completed a term as head of mission in Afghanistan, shares his thoughts.
Every year, some idiot comes up with a list of the most corrupt nations, and Afghanistan is always on top. Here is a country that by all conservative estimates, has had some, say, 2,7 trillion dollars pumped into that country.
On the issue of the benefits not really trickling down to the population, after 15 years of continuous pumping of enormous quantities of money, yes, I've seen that. And there's a lot of reasons. The first in my mind, the first persons I would hold responsible for this are the donors themselves. This was a highly politicised intervention. The donors were under enormous pressure to dispose of a lot of funding. They did that through most of them local NGOs, who are basically proxys of a handful of warlords and very powerful Afghani, who have historically, for the last 30 years, held the population to ransom. So disposing that amount of money, without any mecanisms to follow through, having no mecanisms to see if what the funds were allocated have actually materialised... This is the responsability of those who give the money as well.
At least two US construction companies have been taken to court in the US for building substandard schools that are falling on children. So there are all these great buildings and the kids are outside the buildings, under the mango tree, because they are afraid to go work inside.
So yes, a lot has been wasted, and of course as usual, it's the person on the street who has suffered the loss, who are still freezing in the winter, and who still would possibly deliver a child at home because there's no MCH coverage.