Time, once again, to look at why foreign aid isn't working.

This week, it's the turn of the Sahel, the arid, drought-prone belt of countries skirting the southern edge of the Sahara from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east.

As Reuters reported yesterday, a new study - commissioned by a coalition of major charities working in the region - provides a disheartening assessment of short-sighted, poorly coordinated aid policies.

Two years after the widely reported hunger crisis in Niger, aid agencies are still failing to work effectively, either with the government or with each other. Local populations aren't properly consulted and foreign organisations are still serving up preconceived short-term aid projects that meet donor targets while overlooking the longer-term needs of hungry and poverty-stricken communities.

The most vulnerable - the poorest, the youngest and pretty much every woman - are excluded from decision-making processes. Meaningful benefits from policies such as market liberalisation and budget support for governments have completely failed to trickle down to those who need it most.

And all the while, the strategic rift between development aid workers and their counterparts in emergency response seems to get ever wider.

At the London launch of Beyond Any Drought, Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) think-tank which co-commissioned the report, described the findings as "hauntingly familiar".

No kidding.

The report must be welcomed as a thoroughly researched and well-articulated assessment of the shortcomings of aid in a region that was disgracefully overlooked by the international community until the 2005 crisis erupted.

But it beggars belief that the debate has not moved on. Even at the height of the Niger crisis, it was already understood that this was an emergency not caused by a one-off drought, but rather the logical catastrophic by-product of years of corrosive poverty and political neglect. Everything this report tells us now was more or less known then.

Not only that, but its conclusions remind us once again of a predicament far deeper than Sahelian food security alone. Sitting at the launch at London's Chatham House think tank, it occurred to me that one could close one's eyes and be in almost any meeting in any aid forum discussing any country in Africa at any point over the last ten years.

Why? Because the structures of aid disbursement in the region - ranging from the requirements of donors for quick, easy-to-digest figures, to the institutional priorities of aid agencies, to the media obsession with "crises" - simply will not, and apparently cannot, change.

STILL VOICELESS

We talk about giving a voice to the vulnerable and powerless, but the idea evaporates in front of our eyes because these people are just that - vulnerable and powerless. Academics and aid workers may speak on their behalf with wisdom and conviction, but the mechanisms required for their voices to be heard in a way that truly counts are fundamentally too fragile.

To be fair, there have been successes in the Sahel and the authors of the report refer to them. The emergency response in 2005 brought attention to a long-forgotten crisis. A raft of initiatives such as cash distribution to families who've sold everything for food and the creation of cereal banks have sought to address the longer-term challenges. Several agencies understood the necessity of setting up strategies for the post-emergency period.

Shortly before the release of the report, Britain's Department for International Development (DFID) also announced a £3-million ($6.1-million) programme aimed at reducing long-term vulnerability in Niger, including improvement of early warning systems and training to reduce the effects of disasters on poverty-stricken communities.

Again, all very welcome, but not quite enough. The very existence of this latest report on the Sahel amply highlights the systemic flaws in an aid apparatus that urgently needs to change.

As any campaigner on climate change or HIV/AIDS will tell you, profound structural changes in behaviour require either significant incentives or persuasive coercion. If you've no carrots left, you need a big stick. The unspoken conclusion of the report is that both are still missing when it comes to strategies for the Sahel's poor and hungry.

I wrote a few weeks ago about Roger Riddell's new book "Does Foreign Aid Really Work?", in which he proposes the creation of a global international aid office, funded by compulsory donations from rich countries, which would work exclusively with national aid implementation agencies, run by local people for local people.

Critics say it would be politically unworkable, but it strikes me as an important starting idea. Sooner or later, the untrammelled hordes of donors, consultants, humanitarians and development specialists are going to have to be rounded up and made to focus on a substantive change of direction, rather than on yet another set of recommendations.

The poor and hungry of the Sahel may demand it, but if this report is to be believed, no one is really listening.

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