| Submit your comments on this article | ||
| Arabia | ||
| Did UN food aid for Yemen go to the not-so-poor? | ||
| 2015-03-14 | ||
...where theory meets practice and practice loses... World Food Program has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on food aid intended for the most desperately poor people in Yemen -- but included not just impoverished households, but also some that "belonged to the wealthiest" categories on a national social welfare scale, according to the agency's own audit report. The miscue meant that hundreds of thousands of destitute people in one of the world's poorest countries may well have been excluded from WFP aid, even as money went to others considerably better off -- a situation that the U.N. agency has been trying unsuccessfully to rectify for several years. The reason: U.N. allotments used local government data compiled in 2008 to establish a Social Welfare Fund (SWF) registry of the country's poorest citizens -- and it has not been updated since. The fund was initially administered during the presidency of President-for-Life Ali Abdullah Saleh ... Saleh initially took power as a strongman of North Yemen in 1977, when disco was in flower, but he didn't invite Donna Summer to the inauguration and Blondie couldn't make it... , who is believed to have purloined anywhere from $32 billion to $60 billion during 33 years of rule that ended in 2012, according to a U.N. panel of experts report that was published last month. The WFP audit covered the agency's programs in Yemen from January 2013 through June 2014. It only saw daylight after a formal management response to the document was given in January 2015. Amid political chaos that has engulfed the country over the past five years, the U.N. agency has been working with the World Bank to complete a new version of the SWF registry, but so far without much success. "We are aware of the shortcomings of these lists, but we have no alternative" to using them, an official told Fox News -- while at the same time denying that any skewing of U.N. aid benefits occurred. | ||
| Posted by:Fred |
| #1 Sounds like the UN--corrupt. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2015-03-14 11:59 |