Some context, Oxfam isn't a perfect organization. They struggle with fraud and graft. This is a part of their ongoing effort to reduce it, and sometimes yes that does mean pointing the finger past themselves too.
Oxfam attempted to add up all the numbers in various PDFs linked on the World Bank's website and got a total that's less than the headline figure in the World Bank's press releases. (See the actual report at https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...)
Some of that is probably missing data and some of it reflects that headlines like "USA donates 1 billion" don't actually always result in the US making a bank transfer for a billion dollars. For example sometimes it's a simplification of a complicated loan.
Your comment reflects a common misconception about audits. When the books don't add up that doesn't show that money is actually missing.
I don't love analogies to personal finance but a better one would be to suppose you asked a random US citizen what they spent money on last month and then compared it to their bank account. They'd probably be wrong, and you probably wouldn't have enough information to know exactly how wrong they were because they didn't save all their receipts and so on.
*edit: this report provides no evidence money is missing. to be fair it doesn't disprove missing money either
This analogy explains well but it's missing the important bit: private citizens don't have any requirement to save receipts. Charities and businesses do have that requirement.
Heck, if you give money to someone and they commit fraud and abscond with your money, you get to take a tax write-off for the stolen funds.
At least for US federal taxes, that changed with a very partisan ~2017 law, where Republicans stripped it down to only cover federally declared unique disaster situations.
E.g. for financial fraud crimes, you much more than likely would still be able to take the loss.
Of course, a lack of financial controls makes it easier for people to actually commit fraud, but the Oxfam report didn't go to that next level and look for specific evidence of fraud.
He and his team were physically threatened and had to have bodyguards (actually, it was cops, but they acted as bodyguards). In the early 2000s he decided to call it quit, after 8 years. He told us that the weirdest fraud of all was money laundering, as it was at the same time the easiest and the hardest to prove, depending on who did it.
All that to say actually finding fraud is hard, proving it is even harder, and can be dangerous even for lower orgs, so i won't criticize Oxfam for letting it rest where it is.
You mean like a certain crypto exchange CEO that recently went to jail for it?
If hundreds of billions of dollars in aide over 2 decades isn't fixing these nations, what will?
Most people would probably agree that the reduction in those basic financial pressures to reform is more than offset by the more formal governance requirements which are (sometimes) attached to the granting of multilateral loans (and the types of governance the private sector cares about don't necessarily always align with what the World Bank cares about). But it's not automatic, especially given "improving governance" isn't the main reason the multilaterals make loans in the first place.
There's a lot of change happening now in Kenya, especially in terms of stable and democratic governance, but in no way is it not corrupt. It ranks at near the top consistently amongst African nations for corruption and bribery at all levels of the government.
Both of these organisations certainly have their issues with corruption, fraud, and grift, but that would likely be the case no matter where they are based. If anything, being physically closer to where much of the money is being spent should help them keep a closer eye on the work that they're funding.
One of the functions is each student presenting their country and their interests.
Always got the sense the program is to train public officials on proper methods of government.