Nairobi — Aid donors' insistence on continuing to use highly paid Western consultants to work on development programmes across the East African region is having disastrous consequences, a new report released on July 5 shows.

According to the UK-based aid agency, Action Aid, the typical cost of an expatriate consultant is in the region of $200,000 a year.

But despite pledges that these consultants would only be engaged in appropriate and sustainable aid projects, the report reveals a catalogue of errors, particularly in Tanzania.

Among the aid projects highlighted in the Real Aid report as having failed are: In Tanzania, Japanese-funded advisors installed expensive diesel-run irrigation pumps from Japan rather than the gravitational irrigation ones that are used in other farms.

And, because the price of diesel is so high, the cost of irrigation is now three times the cost of irrigation on other areas of Tanzania.

Only one of the three pumps installed by the project is now in use, because the cost is too high and because no one is available to do repairs.

Action Aid says that UK-funded technical assistance, "was also crucial in pushing Tanzania into privatising water in Dar es Salaam, a reform which failed after less than two years and left millions without water."

Also highlighted was the Norwegian Development Agency's attempt to install a fish freezing plant on Lake Turkana in an effort to persuade local pastoralists to take up fishing as a way of life.

But most of the fish were killed off in a drought in 1984. The Independent newspaper also highlighted the loan of £22 million ($35.2 million) from the World Bank to open a shoe factory in Tanzania.

In 10 years, not one shoe was produced despite the factory costing £277,000 ($443,200) a year to run. The reason for failure was that managers could not find suitable shoe leather to make the shoes.

Action aid says that around 10p in every £1 ($1.6) of UK government spending is spent on "ineffective and overpriced consultants."

The London aid agency says that all too often, consultants fail because they ignore local knowledge and try to impose high-tech solutions. Report author Romilly Greenhill says that aid is not only poorly co-ordinated but "is based on a set of assumptions about expatriate expertise and recipient ignorance."

Action Aid also says that claims that Western countries are increasing aid levels do not bear detailed examination as too much of the spending is effectively "swallowed in administration costs." It estimates that in reality more than 60 per cent of aid flows are "phantom" and that in 2003, developing countries "transferred a net $210 billion to the rich world - that is, it paid out $210 million more than they received in new inflows."

Britain's Department for International Development denies it is forcing technical assistance on developing countries. "Action Aids' claim that debt relief and advice from technical experts are not real aid is absurd," a spokesman said.

"In the mid 1990s, before debt relief, only 2.5 million Ugandan children were in school. Now, after debt relief, there are 6.5 million."

DFiD also said that its spending on consultants had been halved to five per cent since 1997 and that most British aid was now untied, that is without strings attached.