Last week I wrote a post singing the praises of British aid. An ISGlobal trip in the company of a group of members of parliament afforded us the opportunity to observe a world only seen in the Dreams (with a capital D) of the Spanish institutions: effective ministries, an incisive parliament, generous budgets ... a kind of aid nirvana that is proof against the buffets of budget austerity and fluctuations in government.

However, I forgot to mention the fact that all that glitters is not gold. After the post was published I received several emails and tweets from people in the world of development cooperation who value the work being done by the United Kingdom (UK), but who are also conscious of significant weaknesses in the British model . Summarised below are just a few of the comments I received.

- If the UK’s stated priority is to help the world’s poorest countries, why are India, Pakistan and Nigeria among the top five recipients of its foreign aid? Although they have millions of poor citizens, these are, nonetheless, countries with growing resources which should begin to solve their problems without the help of others. These three cases in particular raised some hackles a few months ago when several newspapers reported that UK aid money was supporting megalomaniac space programmes. While this is no trivial matter, it is a very complex issue.Cooperation with India has also been the subject of heated debates because the country’s vibrant economic growth exists side-by-side with medieval living and working conditions that demand all the effort that the Indian government and international donors can make.

- Is Britain’s commitment to human rights not at odds with the fact that they finance some of the most oppressive regimes on the planet?When “tyranny” and “UK aid” are mentioned in the same breath, the case of Ethiopia is the one that immediately comes to mind; Ethiopia tops the list of recipients of UK aid despite being run by a regime that remains in power by means of arrests, assassination and political harassment. Nor do countries like Rwanda shine in this respect: their exceptional development indicators cannot camouflage the serious allegations made about their human rights records. When we posed this question, the simple answer we got was that “poverty rules”.

- Does UK aid finance corrupt governments and corporations in recipient countries? It goes without saying that corruption is an endemic problem in the context of poverty. If the institutions in Africa were like the ones they have in Sweden we might be talking about a completely different problem. But it is one thing to recognise that corruption is a constant variable and quite another to fail to adopt appropriate measures to prevent abuses. The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (a statutory body created by the current liberal-conservative British government) has identified numerous cases in which UK aid has been used to fuel corrupt practices. Its report —published last October—recognises that anti-corruption measures have been strengthened in recent years, but nonetheless includes telling criticism of their real effectiveness.

- Is UK aid helping to perpetuate the worst vices of Britain’s multinational corporations? Politicians demonstrate a very legitimate faith in business and the role companies play in development, but the purpose of aid is distorted when it is used to provide cover for some sorts of ‘business as usual’. For example, the New Forests Company—highly prized by the carbon markets because of its reforestation policies—has been accused of using funds received from the UK and the World Bank to evict 22,000 Ugandan farmers from their land.The 600 million pounds allocated to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (a public private consortium) between 2012 and 2016 have been described as “scandalous” by British NGOs. In another very recent report, EURODAD asserts that several donor agencies (including the UK Department for International Development) are supporting hundreds of private sector projects routed through tax havens. It is not that what the British Government is doing abroad is so different from what it preaches at home, but the practice is still striking.

I am citing just a few examples, but I think you will get the picture. Even in what is seen as one of the most generous and sophisticated aid systems on the planet, there is still a real risk that aid may generate more problems than it solves . And that is a lesson Spain does need to learn.