Newspaper Article: Amount of Money Taken Through Corruption

Check out this article in The Standard, one of the two largest daily newspapers in Kenya.

270bn KSH is lost to corruption each year. That is approximately 3.3 billion USD every year. The article provides very jarring comparisons of that sum to the budgets of ministries within the Kenyan government, but as an American I have been thinking about it in terms of foreign aid.

The PEPFAR program in Kenya has a yearly budget of about $500 million ($15 billion worldwide budget over 5 years). The worldwide Peace Corps budget for FY 2010 is $373 million. I was not able to find the USAID budget for Kenya, but in fiscal year 2005 I found that USAID proposed to invest approximately $1 billion for all of sub-saharan African in the areas of development assistance, child survival and health, and Global AIDS Initiative funding.

Any way you slice it, $3.3 billion comes up as A LOT of money and is probably comparable to, if not greater than, the yearly foreign aid to Kenya. How do Kenyan members of parliament continue to wield an ability to raise their own paychecks? Maybe it is because there is enough foreign aid that services will still be provided. How come schools function even if $3.3 billion is stolen yearly? Maybe it is because governments are forthcoming with money to help out.