The Lessons

It remains to review and interpret the lessons to be learnt from the experience of relationships between Bangladesh and the international aid community in the period 1972–5. Bangladesh was put in the position of having to create a national state at a time of great economic difficulty. The problems were extremely severe and could not be speedily resolved, it has taken time and a series of consecutive good harvest conditions to get the economy onto an even keel, and it has required large amounts of international assistance for it to be accomplished. For the international community and for the United Nations system it has been a period of trying to establish sound and effective aid relationships. Bangladesh’s hesitations about the extent to which she was prepared to rely on assistance from the West, understandable as they were, made her question whether traditional donorrecipient relationships were the best that could be devised and whether they were well adapted to dealing with the needs of poverty stricken applicants for aid. At the same time, some bilateral and multilateral donors with strong, and at times inflexible, views about what they expected of Bangladesh, seem to have been unaware of the damage that they were doing, not only to that country but to themselves as well, by the force and form of pressures that they were exerting.