At the mention of foreign aid, a friend of mine in Kigali likes to explain how it reminds him of Binyavanga Wainaina’s acclaimed satirical essay, “How to write about Africa”. In the cutting 2005 essay, the late Kenyan author advises a presumed novice how to effectively meld white superiority and saviour complex in a book for a captive audience in the West. “Treat Africa as if it were one country,” Binyavanga counsels. “Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.” I remembered my friend when I stumbled upon the New York Times’ Editorial Board analysis earlier this month about how “Foreign aid is having a reckoning”. It notes how a rising African middle class is challenging previous assumptions about foreign aid, from who donates money, to who should get paid to deliver aid, to whose metrics ought to be used to determine whether it was a success. This sums up some of the aid sector controversies that are also the subject of hundreds of academic studies among policymakers and scholars in development economics. The Times analysis is however especially evocative describing the Somali activist Degan Ali’s disillusionment with the foreign aid system, and her subsequent work to try and right things. For her, it comes about after “[s]he watched her mother, an award-winning environmentalist in Somalia, struggle to raise funding, while big grants went to international organizations led by white Americans and Europeans who made influential decisions far from the places they were trying to assist.” My incarnation working in community development resonates with her, as many other Africans in the development sector will be familiar with Ms Ali’s disappointment. She is the founder of NEAR, a network of organizations led by people from the Global South who are trying to reinvent foreign aid by shifting money and power closer to the communities that aid is meant to serve. The Times explains how efforts like hers helped push donors and large aid organisations to commit in 2016 to send 25 per cent of humanitarian aid funding “as directly as possible” to local and national organisations by 2020, a promise known as the Grand Bargain. But those promises, the analysis laments, have fallen embarrassingly short. Direct funding to local and national groups actually declined, from 3.5 per cent in 2016 to 2.1 per cent in 2020. It goes on to show how fixing global humanitarian aid in a daunting task. Perhaps we can’t do much about that, except to remind us of the urgency to walk the talk about African solutions to African problems. We already can look for one solution. To get away from reliance on Western assistance it will help that the African Continental Free Trade Area has opened for business since last month. In increasing intra-African trade it is expected the AfCFTA will accelerate economic growth and sustainable development, bringing the continent to its own. In addition to a market of 1.3 people, it will boost Africa’s trading position in the global market and strengthen the continent’s common voice and policy space in global negotiations to attract trade than aid. That, however, remains in the future. And, as the spectre of the Covid-19 pandemic reminds us, most countries in the continent need the support not only to inoculate their populations but get their economies back on their feet. This shows how we may not dispense with aid just yet, even as the sector still needs reform. Yet, even this is not assured. As the Times analysis concludes, aid is not all about saving those in need. Development assistance is one of the three D’s — alongside diplomacy and defence — considered crucial to cementing alliances and advancing donor countries’ interests around the world. That’s a big reason it might be resistant to reform.
