After 30 years of ruling Equatorial Guinea, President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo apparently decided that he needed to do something to burnish his unsavory reputation. So he promised Unesco, or the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, $3 million a year for five years to finance the Unesco-Obiang prize.

Half the money would go to five award winners and half to cover the costs of choosing the winners. The goal: to honor achievements that “improve the quality of human life.” However, Mr. Obiang’s behavior mocks all that Unesco is supposed to stand for, as well as the prize’s stated rationale.

He is charged by human rights and anticorruption activists with embezzling hundreds of millions of dollars from his tiny oil-rich state, while most of his people — 77 percent according to one measure — live in abject poverty. In its 2009 human rights report, the State Department cited a pattern of abuses there, including unlawful killings by security forces, torture of detainees and prisoners and official impunity and arbitrary arrest.

The Unesco board should have had the good sense to decline Mr. Obiang’s donation from the start. Its plan to award the first prize this year has now stirred a wide international protest. Among those demanding that the board overturn its decision to award a prize in Mr. Obiang’s name: seven recipients of Unesco’s prestigious World Press Freedom prize; a global coalition of more than 170 anticorruption organizations; and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

The board has another chance to avoid further embarrassment and damage to Unesco’s reputation when it meets on Tuesday. African members should take the lead in rejecting Mr. Obiang’s self-aggrandizing largess. Instead, he should be encouraged to spend the money at home to reverse the abysmally low levels of health care and education, establish the rule of law and “improve the quality of human life” of his own people.