MY LAST ARTICLE FOR AFRICANPATH

DEVELOPMENT AID TO AFRICA: QUO VADIS? (Part II)

Poverty is in the eye of the beholder _ Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize of Economics

A year has passed since the much talked about issue of Vanity Fair on Africa, with its spectacular twenty different covers. It has also been a year since I wrote my first take on it, expressed my reticences about the Sachs v. Easterly debate and promised to come back to Sachs’ ‘Big Dream’ for Africa… I finally decided to come back to it, but I’m afraid only to reiterate my initial reticences. This is, therefore, my last take on the issue – which is only appropriate since this is also my last article for Africanpath.

I wrote in that first take that my reticences stemmed mainly from the realisation that most of the issues raised by that and other related debates were not essentially about economics but about charitable aid. And that I maintain. So, why write about it again? Well, firstly, because I always make it a point to keep my promises (even if only a year later…) and, secondly, because there are, nevertheless, a few considerations I deem worthy of making about the world of “development aid” or, to be more precise, the world of the “charitable aid industry” to Africa and Africans, from an economic perspective.

From the top of my head I can think of a few established “engines of growth” in the developing world, such as ‘infrastructure development’, ‘technology transfer’, ‘seed capital’, ‘value-addition to raw materials’, ‘comparative advantages-based trade’, ‘self-sustained agriculture’, ‘redistribution of assets’, ‘small business development’, ‘social enterprise’, ‘primary and secondary education’, ‘vocational training’, ‘learning by doing’, 'women's political and economic empowerment', ‘institutional strengthening and organisational streamlining’, etc., among a range of inputs across the various economic sectors that can significantly contribute to endogenous economic, human and social development.

However, I never came across one single development model where ‘charity’ plays any meaningful role as an “engine of growth”, whichever way we approach it. That said, I recognise that it is extremely difficult to achieve any significant level of development when large segments of the population of a country or region are affected by HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis or Malaria – and here Sachs’ projects and the money he is able to raise for them play a role in saving lives and improving the living conditions of such affected populations, thereby securing the basis upon which to build strong economies in the continent.

Unfortunately, though, there is a major drawback to that kind of projects which ultimately prevents them, in most cases, from being taken as reliable and sustainable inputs to development: they are randomly located and funded and, more importantly, exogenously determined and disconnected from the targeted regions and countries’ economic, political and institutional structures. At this point, I am compelled to return to that Vanity Fair issue to recast the tale of that African Health Minister who was so grateful to Sachs for the extra money she got for her ministry’s budget and Sachs’ expressed outrage at the “ridiculously small budget allocated to health” in that and other African countries.

Of course he was right about that. I wonder, however, how much of the current African governments’ budgetary strife in the education, health and other social sectors could have been prevented if Sachs had expressed the same level of outrage when he was in a position to do so throughout the 80s and 90s when the ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ for Africa, spearheaded by the Bretton Woods Institutions, were being inspired and actively guided by his “universal shock therapy” prescriptions?

That question leads me to one critical ‘entry point’ to the understanding of the ever growing “charitable aid industry” to Africa and its current branching out to NGOs operating in virtually all sectors of policy making in the continent – yes, it is an industry: it increasingly operates as an employer of choice for the masses of young, and the not so young, unemployed or under-employed people flocking to Africa to fulfill all sorts of needs, dreams and fantasies (including this one, or those which led to this report), while crowding-out the masses of unemployed and under-employed Africans who, more often than not, end up in the West as immigrants invariably treated as a ‘burden’ to the host countries’ public budgets, which are themselves continuously ‘balanced’ by the transfers and remittances from their aid organisations and workers in Africa and the relief of part of the budgetary pressures induced by their domestic levels of unemployment; and it is self-justified: with very few notable exceptions, it tends to lack openness and transparency as far as its raison d’etre and modus operandi are concerned, hardly contributes to any transfer of know-how or technology relevant to its target groups or countries’ self-reliance and, in order to maintain the continuous influx of donations and public funding it relies upon, often resorts to over-dramatising, thus reinforcing, the problems it was supposed to help solve in the first place.

That critical ‘entry point’ refers to the, concealed or overly assumed, sense of ‘guilt’ apparently moving its main protagonists and determining the way poverty in Africa is seen through the eyes of their beholders – the same eyes which appear wide shut to such realities as the one reported just two days ago by the Black AIDS Institute, according to which the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the US is higher than that observed in some of the African countries most affected by the epidemic, such as Botswana or Uganda. It is this sense of (just misguided or simply irrational?) ‘guilt’ which is acting as a “engine of growth” for that self-justified industry and, with its self-centered, self-righteous captains often perceived in the recipient countries as the ‘new colonisers’ or the ‘new missionaries’ (yes, “The White Man’s Burden” is back with a vengeance…), perpetuating the dependency structures that have characterised for centuries the relationship between the West and Africa – a continent many invariably conceive as an abstract entity only awaiting their arrival to materialise itself into real countries with real (if frequently failing) governments, real people with dreams and aspirations of their own, real cities and villages with their own rhythms and paces, real cultures and institutions with their own history, in short, a real continent with its own place in the world. Thus all seems to suggest that the “charitable aid industry” has been more effective as a guilt relief engine than a poverty relief one.

I would like to finish on a positive note, though, by calling your attention to this young African and the inspiration and faith in the future of the continent he has been inspiring: now, that’s what I call a ‘Cheetah’!

DEVELOPMENT AID TO AFRICA: QUO VADIS? (Part II)

Poverty is in the eye of the beholder _ Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize of Economics

A year has passed since the much talked about issue of Vanity Fair on Africa, with its spectacular twenty different covers. It has also been a year since I wrote my first take on it, expressed my reticences about the Sachs v. Easterly debate and promised to come back to Sachs’ ‘Big Dream’ for Africa… I finally decided to come back to it, but I’m afraid only to reiterate my initial reticences. This is, therefore, my last take on the issue – which is only appropriate since this is also my last article for Africanpath.

I wrote in that first take that my reticences stemmed mainly from the realisation that most of the issues raised by that and other related debates were not essentially about economics but about charitable aid. And that I maintain. So, why write about it again? Well, firstly, because I always make it a point to keep my promises (even if only a year later…) and, secondly, because there are, nevertheless, a few considerations I deem worthy of making about the world of “development aid” or, to be more precise, the world of the “charitable aid industry” to Africa and Africans, from an economic perspective.

From the top of my head I can think of a few established “engines of growth” in the developing world, such as ‘infrastructure development’, ‘technology transfer’, ‘seed capital’, ‘value-addition to raw materials’, ‘comparative advantages-based trade’, ‘self-sustained agriculture’, ‘redistribution of assets’, ‘small business development’, ‘social enterprise’, ‘primary and secondary education’, ‘vocational training’, ‘learning by doing’, 'women's political and economic empowerment', ‘institutional strengthening and organisational streamlining’, etc., among a range of inputs across the various economic sectors that can significantly contribute to endogenous economic, human and social development.

However, I never came across one single development model where ‘charity’ plays any meaningful role as an “engine of growth”, whichever way we approach it. That said, I recognise that it is extremely difficult to achieve any significant level of development when large segments of the population of a country or region are affected by HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis or Malaria – and here Sachs’ projects and the money he is able to raise for them play a role in saving lives and improving the living conditions of such affected populations, thereby securing the basis upon which to build strong economies in the continent.

Unfortunately, though, there is a major drawback to that kind of projects which ultimately prevents them, in most cases, from being taken as reliable and sustainable inputs to development: they are randomly located and funded and, more importantly, exogenously determined and disconnected from the targeted regions and countries’ economic, political and institutional structures. At this point, I am compelled to return to that Vanity Fair issue to recast the tale of that African Health Minister who was so grateful to Sachs for the extra money she got for her ministry’s budget and Sachs’ expressed outrage at the “ridiculously small budget allocated to health” in that and other African countries.

Of course he was right about that. I wonder, however, how much of the current African governments’ budgetary strife in the education, health and other social sectors could have been prevented if Sachs had expressed the same level of outrage when he was in a position to do so throughout the 80s and 90s when the ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ for Africa, spearheaded by the Bretton Woods Institutions, were being inspired and actively guided by his “universal shock therapy” prescriptions?

That question leads me to one critical ‘entry point’ to the understanding of the ever growing “charitable aid industry” to Africa and its current branching out to NGOs operating in virtually all sectors of policy making in the continent – yes, it is an industry: it increasingly operates as an employer of choice for the masses of young, and the not so young, unemployed or under-employed people flocking to Africa to fulfill all sorts of needs, dreams and fantasies (including this one, or those which led to this report), while crowding-out the masses of unemployed and under-employed Africans who, more often than not, end up in the West as immigrants invariably treated as a ‘burden’ to the host countries’ public budgets, which are themselves continuously ‘balanced’ by the transfers and remittances from their aid organisations and workers in Africa and the relief of part of the budgetary pressures induced by their domestic levels of unemployment; and it is self-justified: with very few notable exceptions, it tends to lack openness and transparency as far as its raison d’etre and modus operandi are concerned, hardly contributes to any transfer of know-how or technology relevant to its target groups or countries’ self-reliance and, in order to maintain the continuous influx of donations and public funding it relies upon, often resorts to over-dramatising, thus reinforcing, the problems it was supposed to help solve in the first place.

That critical ‘entry point’ refers to the, concealed or overly assumed, sense of ‘guilt’ apparently moving its main protagonists and determining the way poverty in Africa is seen through the eyes of their beholders – the same eyes which appear wide shut to such realities as the one reported just two days ago by the Black AIDS Institute, according to which the incidence of HIV/AIDS in the US is higher than that observed in some of the African countries most affected by the epidemic, such as Botswana or Uganda. It is this sense of (just misguided or simply irrational?) ‘guilt’ which is acting as a “engine of growth” for that self-justified industry and, with its self-centered, self-righteous captains often perceived in the recipient countries as the ‘new colonisers’ or the ‘new missionaries’ (yes, “The White Man’s Burden” is back with a vengeance…), perpetuating the dependency structures that have characterised for centuries the relationship between the West and Africa – a continent many invariably conceive as an abstract entity only awaiting their arrival to materialise itself into real countries with real (if frequently failing) governments, real people with dreams and aspirations of their own, real cities and villages with their own rhythms and paces, real cultures and institutions with their own history, in short, a real continent with its own place in the world. Thus all seems to suggest that the “charitable aid industry” has been more effective as a guilt relief engine than a poverty relief one.

I would like to finish on a positive note, though, by calling your attention to this young African and the inspiration and faith in the future of the continent he has been inspiring: now, that’s what I call a ‘Cheetah’!