“Hungrier, poorer, less educated, more pessimistic, more corrupt, and you can't tell the politicians from the witchdoctors. Africans, less esteemed than ever, seemed to me the most lied=to people on earth – manipulated by their governments, burned by foreign experts, be-fooled by charities, and cheated at every turn”, wrote Paul Theroux when he re-visited Africa back in 2004. “To be an African leader was to be a thief, but evangelists stole people's innocence, and self-serving aid-agencies gave them false hope, which seemed worse.”
Over the last few months I have, on occasion, when it all became too overwhelmingly depressing, commented on how futile it all seems here in Africa. The children frolic, the women work and the men laze around under the ancient mango trees, discussing who-knows-what. The road is washed away by the first rains in 5 years; everyone sits in the shade of their trucks for three, four, five, six days, gets up only to wash, kneel towards the East to pray, five times a day, and waits...
“Why aren't you digging and bringing branches and rocks to make the road passable so that we can all continue our journey?” we ask.
“It is the government's duty to come fix the road. They must come. If we start fixing the road, they won't come” they reply.
“Has anyone called the government?” we ask.
“No. But they will come.”
“How will they know?” Shoulders shrug. Hands turn up. I take photographs of the mud and the water and the road that is no more. I walk through the long line of heavily-laden trucks and buses and dilapidated rust-bucket vehicles that seem to double in number every day – the line now disappearing over the hill in the distant horizon after the three days we have been stuck here. “Are you going to write about this and show the world what is happening in Africa?” they want to know – a question we have often heard in almost every country we have travelled through. They expect us to go back home and write about the hardship, the need, the desperate state they are in – so that our governments will send money, send food, provide. And while they wait for that aid to come – which it will, they know – they continue to drag their feet, sit in the shade of their trucks, shrug their shoulders, turn up their hands, and wait...
“Mom, you cannot help people who do not want to help themselves” said my daughter, in tears and abject exasperation, when she was with the IRC, working with the Sudanese refugees on the border in Northern Kenya. Africans, young and old, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, rural and urban, all beg and plead and demand and expect – with a weird sense of entitlement. No 'please' – only 'give me', 'donne-moi'. In fact, I read somewhere that, apparently many of the African languages do not even have a word for 'please'. If you have something that they need or want, they put their hand out and ask for it. “Give me that shirt.” “Give me that book.” Give me a pen.” “Give me money.” The assumption is that you have more than you need so you will give to them. One morning, back in Cameroon, a man actually said to us, when I told him we don't have any clothes to give as we only had what we needed “That is not true. White people always have far more than they need.” But if there is no word for 'please', there is also no hard feelings when you say 'no', and this is the part that white people (and yes, this IS a race issue – in the eyes of Africa, the whites as the haves and the blacks are the have-nots) seem not to be able to remember; it is quite alright to say 'no'!
Whether it be the giant slavery chip we continue to carry on our white shoulders – and which the Africans will make sure stays there and never, ever diminishes in size, or be it the Christian duty of charity, or the guilt for having more than others – albeit because of hard work and effort, Africans have come to expect everything they want and need to come from the white world.
For quite a time now I have had a niggling question in my mind. It is very much a hypothetical question because there really is no answer for it – simply because there never is an answer to a 'what if' question in history. And this is a 'what if' question: “What if white people had never come to Africa as missionaries, as colonists, as exploiters? What if there had only been Africans travelling to Europe and the New World and come back with their newly-acquired knowledge and skills? What would this continent and its peoples have been like? Where would they be today?” Well,there may be no answer to that question, but what we do know, for sure, is that there probably would not have been the greatest disservice, the greatest patronising insult, the greatest wrong we have done to Africa yet: Foreign Aid.
But, I realise only too well that as emotional as this issue is, emotions are not going to solve the seemingly insoluable problem. So let us look at some of the facts:
“Foreign aid plays a vital role in improving the lives of poor households across the developing world. However, its strategic contribution to poverty reduction and development is the subject of increasing debate. Uncertainty is also prompted by downward pressure on donor country aid budgets brought about by the fragile global economic environment. Greater confidence in aid effectiveness is vital now that the response to climate change may substantially increase the flow of funds from rich to poor countries.”
So opens a comprehensive article on the necessity and effectiveness of Foreign Aid in Africa in the 'Wolfensohn Center for Development working papers' that I came across recently. According to this study – dated July 2011, the total foreign aid to Africa, the voluntary transfer of funds from richer governments to assist less fortunate countries, or, as the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) likes to call it, , the “Official Development Assistance” (ODA), was US$128.7 billion in 2010, up from $119.6 billion in 2009. But then there is also 'humanitarian aid', specifically targeted for emergencies such as natural disasters – but as we know (and I have personally witnessed in Thailand after the tsunami) these are seldom much more than promises, rather than actual transferring concrete aid and hardly relates to what eventually actually gets to the disaster stricken region – often minimal compared to the initial – publicity polished – promise. Except of course where the humanitarian aid involves the cost of reconstruction of war zones. The motivation for this 'humanitarian aid' probably reflects guilt and remorse more than any other form of aid – as is seen and explained in Iraq and Afghanistan – currently the largest recipients of foreign aid. Aid for sub-Saharan Africa amounted to $26.5 billion in 2010, barely 20% of total ODA – and there-in lies the tale. If it is so little in the greater scheme of things, I dread to imagine what the effect would have been on this continent if the world had cared more about it and its fate.
Yet another form of Foreign Aid is “technical assistance”, a controversial area which is poorly defined and measured. It refers to the transfer of skills and knowledge, typically carried out by individual consultants from the donor country, accounting for just under 15% of total aid in 2009. UNDER 15%! Surely this should be over 85%! In an article I posted about the lack of educational facilities in the Congo-Brazzaville and Congo DRC, I did mention how I thought bringing technical expertise would surely be the answer to these developing countries. (I also mentioned how the Indians apparently have come into particularly Angola to bring skills – but not to teach and apprentice people and at least leave them with the necessary skills to improve their lives. They bring in skilled artisans, do the work, get the money and leave.) My feeling is still that if anyone was going to bring in any form of foreign aid, it should only be in the form and shape of financing skilled people to come impart their knowledge – and then leave.
So – “Official Development Assistance”. A noble term that covers a multitude of motivations, hidden agendas, deeper meanings. The boards proclaiming who is responsible in Africa line the roads like the bill boards on the entrance to a large American city; every 50 metres or so yet another board advertising the Aid agency present in this particular area: Samaritans Purse, Child Aid, World Vision, Ethnic-American Help Org., World Learning, Netherlands Coop, Oxfam, Foster Plan, Christian Children’s fund, UNICEF – and the list goes on. And on. And on. Everyone wants to feel that they are helping. Whatever the motivation, the aid-giving governments or the ngo aid organisations have no difficulty in persuading people to donate that “only $3.00 per month” and having the funds to put up their boards to advertise their magnanimous nature. There is "multilateral aid" - funds made available to support the development programmes of UN agencies, the European Union, the World Bank and regional development banks, and there is “bilateral aid" which is paid directly to developing countries, usually in the form of grants. Its allocation also reflects the priorities of individual donor countries rather than a global strategic plan for poverty reduction.
Generally – and yes, this is very broadly speaking, governments and ngo's embarking on aid programmes are inspired by three broad motives, of course varying greatly between donors and very much coloured and influenced by whatever the prevailing global political and economic climate. – At least, these are the 'official' motivations...
First of all there is the desire to tackle extreme poverty on ethical grounds. Such compassion is especially powerful in the context of humanitarian emergencies when the need for assistance is most evident, often through the lens of global media coverage.
The second motive stems from the premise that, in a globalised world, countries large and small are interdependent. The prosperity of one increases the economic potential of the other. And again, I must remind that these are the 'official' motivations...
Controlling the spread of disease, whether in humans, livestock or crops, of course calls for participation of – and competence in all governments. And excessive inequality is known to increase the supply of migrant workers, not always welcome in richer countries!
Fragile states are less able to prevent the outbreak of armed conflict or, in some circumstances, to stamp out the recruitment of foot soldiers of terrorism. Recent political instability in Yemen has prompted a flurry of proposals for increased foreign aid. And, when you look at this argument, you surely have to ask the question whether this is a 'motivation' or an excuse. Where does foreign aid end and foreign interference begin? How much are the rich countries and the NGO's – in particular religion-based ones, willing to pay in order to buy themselves a valid place in the country in which they have 'invested'?
That brings us to the third of the 'official' motives, namely the proactive pursuit of strategic interests. These may be political or economic in nature. Aid is a tool for constructing alliances in the international domain, now as in the Cold War era, And China has adopted an aggressive aid strategy to leverage access to Africa’s natural resources.A good example is Ethiopia – one of the countries where the irreparable damage done by Foreign Aid to an entire nation is probably the most visible. Africa’s largest aid recipient is in fact Ethiopia, and exactly because it is strategically so vitally important for its proximity to Sudan and Somalia. Especially in the southern part of Ethiopia the effects of foreign aid on the people are so sadly evident. Their dignity, their pride, their heritage – all wiped out, and all that is left is a sad, sad picture of poor, unemployed, unskilled people with their hands out, begging – because they have no memory of fending for themselves.
If the tragedy of seeing the once noble and proud Massai warriors and lion hunters reduced to selling trinkets to tourists and stalking the Tanzanian and Kenyan beaches, Massai 'beach boys' dressed up in their full traditional dress – with white sneakers and reflecting sunglasses added in a garish mistake for style, looking for the vulnerable – and preferably rich white woman – who might just be their ticket out of Africa at best, their next meal ticket and hotel bed at worst – if that is not enough to break your heart, then it was really in Ethiopia that you could not help but gasp in horror at what this once-advanced and highly developed culture has been reduced to. If only --- If only, when foreign aid came in to rescue the millions starving in the worst drought in living memory, had brought their food and medicines for the short term, and then left their bags of seed and their technical advice on how to re-start an agriculture in extreme conditions – and left. If only they had laid down the law and made it clear that, while they are doing the job of the leaders of the country – feeding and caring for the suffering people, it did not give the government license to go wage a war against Eritrea. If only the western countries and the do-gooders and the charitable organisations and the church groups and the rock stars had come in, helped, given the skills and the means to make a fresh start – and then left. These people had been not only coping and surviving disaster and whatever nature and life threw at them for longer than Europe has been populated, but they had, once, thrived and built and prospered and ruled. These people once carved magnificent cathedrals out of solid volcanic rock, and decorated and painted and created works of exquisite beauty. These people once mastered the art of farming in desert land, overcoming the obiquetous African droughts and floods and natural distasters. These people had once written the most beautiful books, illustrating them in gold and carmine, leaving invaluable treasure behind for propsperity. These people had once painted ceilings and walls to rival the best the Renaissance had produced. But now they have lost the know-how to cope with anything – let alone the extreme challenges Africa poses. They have lost their pride, because they have lost who they are. They have lost their dignity because they have been deprived of their confidence.
The ngo sector is – finally - expressing concern that the pendulum in aid motivation has swung too far towards politics and security. The needs of the poor are taking second place to geopolitics, they say. Strategic imperatives also diminish the association of aid with principles. The revolution in Egypt earlier this year is an excellent example of the historic role of US aid in propping up the illegitimate Mubarak regime. Except – express concern is fine and well – if only the pendulum was of the size and weight that anyone could possibly control at this late stage.
I realise that unless you are personally and directly involved in the whole Foreign Aid machine, there is absolutely no way you can even begin to understand the intricacies and complexities of it all. From where you and I stand it is most certainly a mammoth monster which grows and mutates as we speak. --- And yet, and yet...
A very interesting http://matadornetwork.com/change/7-worst-international-aid-ideas/blog article in which Richard Stupart explains it so much better than I could:
Like my energy drink or the kids starve. Image via Africa is a country
Maybe their hearts were in the right place. Maybe not. Either way, these are solid contenders for the title of “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism.”1. One million t-shirts for Africa
Aid circles employ the cynical acronym SWEDOW (stuff we don’t want) to describe initiatives like Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T-Shirts project. Sadler had admittedly never been to Africa, and had never worked in an aid or development environment before. But he cared a great deal, and came up with the idea to send a million free shirts to Africa in order to help the people there.
Like some sort of lightning rod for the combined venom of the humanitarian aid world, Jason found himself pilloried across the web in a matter of weeks. Everyone from armchair bloggers to senior economists spat fire on his dream until it eventually ground to a halt. In July 2010, Jason threw in the towel and abandoned his scheme. And somewhere in Africa, an economy sighed in relief.
Why was the idea so bad?
Image cia PDX Reader
Firstly, it’s debatable whether there is actually a need for T-shirts in Africa. There is practically nowhere that people who want shirts are unable to afford them. Wanting to donate them is a classic case of having something you want to donate and assuming it is needed. Just because you have a really large hammer does not mean that everything in the world is a nail.
Secondly, dumping a million free shirts is inefficient. What it would cost to pack them, ship them, and transport them overland to wherever it is that they are meant to go would cost close to the manufacturing cost of the shirts in the first place. That’s just incredibly wasteful. If you wanted to get people shirts, it would be far more cost effective to simply commission their manufacture locally, creating a stimulus to the local textile economy in the process.
Which brings us to the third critique of free stuff. When people in the target community already have an economy functioning in part on the sale and repair of the stuff you want to donate (shirts in this instance), then dumping a million of them free is the economic equivalent of an atom bomb. Why buy a shirt anymore when you can get a five-year supply for free? Why get yours repaired when you can simply toss it and get another? And in the process everyone who once sold shirts or practiced tailoring finds themselves unemployed and unable to provide money for themselves or their families to buy anything.
Except shirts. Because those are now free.
And before you think dumping free shirts is the sin of an uneducated maverick, Jason’s poor logic was subsequently repeated by World Vision, in accepting 100,000 NFL shirts to dump on some poor, shirtless village in Africa.
2. TOMS Buy-One-Give-One
Bearing in mind all of the criticisms above, TOMS shoe brand has built a brand on the premise that buying one pair of their shoes automatically includes the provision of another pair of shoes to an underprivileged child in a developing nation somewhere. Three months after Jason abandoned sending a million shirts to Africa, TOMS celebrated sending a million pairs of shoes to the underprivileged. It continues to do so.
While there are possibly more people in the world who need shoes than might need shirts (though this is debatable), TOMS can be (and has been) broadly criticised for the same kinds of unintended consequences of dumping shoes in places where people might otherwise be employed to make them.
while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty.Further, though, the TOMS campaign — like the million shirts — misses the fundamental point that not having a pair of shoes (or a shirt, christmas toy, etc.) is not a problem about not having shoes. It’s a problem of poverty. Shoelessness, such as it is, is a symptom of a much bigger and more complex problem. And while donating a pair of shoes helps shoelessness, it does not help poverty.
Things like jobs help poverty. Jobs making things like shoes, for example. But TOMS doesn’t make its shoes in Africa, it makes them in China where it’s presumably cheaper to make two pairs of shoes and give one away than it is to get people in a needier community to make one pair of shoes.
The result of this setup, as Zizek explains most succinctly, is that on a big-picture level, TOMS (and other buy-my-product-and-donate companies) are busy building the exploitative global structure that produces economic inequality, while on the other hand pretending that supporting them actually does something to fix it.
It doesn’t. It just gives people shoes.
3. Machine gun preacher
The criticisms of TOMS, Jason, and other purveyors of SWEDOW tend to be intellectual, economic concerns. Problems with Sam Childers, the machine gun preacher, are so much more straightforward.
It’s dangerous and insane.
After a misspent youth in the United States and a few years spent behind bars, Childers headed to Sudan on a missionary project to repair huts devastated in the war. There he would be commanded by God to build an orphanage for local children and, incidentally, take up arms against the Lord’s Resistance Army, who was terrorizing the region. With an AK-47 and a bible, Sam would spread the wrath of the Lord and rescue abducted children for the next few years.
Imagine John Rambo with a biker’s beard hunting rebels in the savannah and you pretty much get the idea.
No matter how much you care to help the women/children/villages/gorillas in a particular warzone, trying to solve what is in effect a problem of armed insecurity through establishing another minor armed militia is never a good idea. However entertaining the film turns out to be, it’s the security studies equivalent of pouring gasoline on a forest fire. Peace — and a long-term future for those affected by violence in what is now Southern Sudan — can only be guaranteed through a diplomatic agreement between the groups that command the thousands of men with guns. Playing Rambo in the bush would not be tolerated back home, and it shouldn’t be here in Africa.
Childers is not the first person to get the crazy idea of solving violent situations by running in with guns. Hussein Mohammed Farah Aidid is an ex-Marine, and the son of Gen. Mohammed Farah Aidid (of Black Hawk Down fame), who returned to Somalia in 1996 to lead the powerful Habr Gedir clan in the country’s civil war. That hasn’t worked out so well either.
4. 50 Cent ransoming children in Somalia
Just this month, rapper 50 Cent visited Dolow in Somalia at the request of the World Food Programme. The trip was presumably intended to raise awareness of the issues in the way that Angelina Jolie and George Clooney did for Sudan and Oprah did for South Africa. There are quite a few examples of celebrities connecting with Africa actually. There is even a mapto keep track of who has “dibs” on what region.
If the trip was nothing more than Fifty touring hard-hit areas in order to bring the world’s lazy media along, then it would have been useful at best, and benign at worst. But there is more.
If you Like the Facebook page for his Street King energy drink, he will provide a meal for a child in need. If the page received a million Likes before Sunday, he would donate an additional million meals.
So let’s break that down.
- If you Like Fifty’s Facebook page — without even buying the drink — a child, presumably in Somalia, gets fed.
- We can infer that there is a pot of dollars somewhere earmarked for feeding needy children. Two million meals worth of feeding if you count the million Like-meals plus the potential million bonus.
- Those meals, while they could be donated, and have presumably been budgeted for, willnot be, except to the extent that you give Street King props online.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is called extortion. Dramatically photographed, concealed-as-humanitarian-activism, extortion. I can feed so very many meals to these starving children, but I won’t unless you give me something.
The benefit of involving celebrities in aid work is often that it works to focus the attention of their fans and the media machine more generally on understanding, for however brief a moment, something that is happening somewhere in the world. Out of that can come the kind of empathy and activism that makes things like the Save Darfur campaign possible.
The celebrity’s contribution, though, hinges on whether they can successfully translate attention on them into attention to the issues. When a humanitarian issue becomes a platform for pushing an energy drink on the back of people’s suffering, we should be ashamed.
5. Donor fund restrictions
Photo by WhereTheRoadGoes
Not so much an organisation or a specific event, this a policy constraint that isn’t as widely known as it should be. When many governments donate aid money to countries that have been wracked by disasters, or which require long-term assistance, it often comes with a giant asterisk in the fine print:
A significant portion of the cash provided for such assistance must be spent on goods and services provided by suppliers from the donating country.
Not only inefficient, this policy prescription can lead to outright ridiculous results. In the case of the Mozambique floods in 2000, I met a medical volunteer who explained how the only US-made bikes that they could find to get around the country on short notice were Harley Davidsons. And so three of them ended up running between medical stations like some breed of medical Hell’s Angel. Fascinating to behold, but utterly wasteful.
Far more troublesome, as is often the case, are the economics of this sort of donate-and-bill-back activity. Where the donor aid money is tied to spending on donor-country products and services, far less of the amount spent in aid actually ends up benefitting the recipient country. Few local people are employed, and few local organisations see any new opportunities to bid for and provide aid-goods.
This has two effects: firstly, what could have been a large financial boost arriving with the aid is effectively neutered — shunted into a much smaller economy-within-the-economy; secondly, without the opportunity for competitive pricing on local goods, the money is spent on buying comparatively expensive imported products and staff. Harley Davidsons, rather than dirtbikes, for a tenth of the price.
6. Making food aid the same colour as cluster munitions.
Probably the most devastating screw-up in the history of helping was the decisions that lead to cluster munitions and daily food ration packets both being coloured canary yellow.
Left is delicious. Right will kill you. You try tell the difference if you can't read English and live out in the steppes.
Each yellow BLU-97 bomblet is the size of a soda can and is capable of killing anyone within a 50 meter radius and severely injuring anyone within 100 meters from the detonation. A Humanitarian Daily Rations (HDR) package contains a 2,000 calorie meal.
It was inevitable that Afghans coming across the yellow packages in the field would confuse the two. Children in particular — with no English and little idea of what a BLU-97 is even if they did — would investigate the yellow containers and try to pick them up, with devastating consequences that an Air Force general described as “unfortunate.”
7. Making USAID a foreign policy tool
In 1990, on the eve of the first Gulf War, Yemeni Ambassador Abdullah Saleh al-Ashtal voted no to using force against Iraq in a security council session. US Ambassador Thomas Pickering walked to the Yemeni Ambassador’s seat and retorted, “That was the most expensive No vote you ever cast.” Immediately afterwards, USAID ceased operations and funding in Yemen.
USAID, despite its appearances as a benign, well-intentioned member of the humanitarian aid community, is deeply compromised in being beholden to the whims of US foreign policy. Unlike organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières which strictly guard their neutrality, USAID’s ability to hand out food aid and other assistance is subject to the political agenda of groups like Congress and the US Military.
In the case of the army, USAID in Afghanistan has repeatedly had to participate in administering humanitarian relief in cooperation with army elements engaged in the “hearts and minds” strategy of manipulating assistance in order to win over civilian populations. The unfortunate side effect of this relationship is that USAID’s operations come to be seen by opposing forces as complicit in the enemy war effort and thus legitimate targets. An even more unfortunate side effect is that other humanitarian groups with far more benevolent agendas may find themselves tarred with the same political brush and unwittingly targeted for attacks and abductions too.
Sometimes bad aid is just the consequence of someone caring too much, but knowing too little. Other times it’s people who should have known better not being diligent in considering the consequences of their actions. And sometimes politicians and unscrupulous businessmen are simply manipulating the suffering of others for their own ends. When it’s benign or thwarted, it’s easy enough to laugh it off. But when a bad idea is carried through, the results can be diabolical.
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