Saying the unsayable about aid
Time for a major rethink to shake up the badly failing aid industry
Just because that Orange Blob in the White House is mad and bad does not preclude the possibility that somewhere within the mayhem lurks something that is not entirely crazy. I’m not tempted to go overboard here but the Trump administration’s decision to end all forms of foreign aid (except to those closest to its heart, e.g. to Israel) contains a scintilla of logic because this whole aid business is in urgent need of a rethink.
As matters stand there is increasing evidence that aid programmes have been hugely wasteful, are often based on political rather than humanitarian priorities, have a bad habit of lining the pockets of corrupt rulers and, here’s the bottom line: by and large, they simply do nothing to alleviate poverty.
It is painful to write these words because foreign aid has meant the difference between life and death for recipients. On the ground it is often distributed by dedicated and brave people and when it works it can achieve formidable results, most notably in the elimination of preventable diseases.
It’s the ‘when it works’ bit that matters because so much of this cash leaves a trail of waste and worse. The classic example is the enormous excitement generated by Bob Geldof’s’ Live Aid concerts started in 1985 to alleviate famine in Ethiopia. Much of the money raised ended up in the hands of the vile Ethiopian dictatorship which used it to buy weapons from Russia and to further its brutal policy of tribal cleansing. Mr Geldof brushed aside advice from people on the ground who said there was no infrastructure outside the government to distribute this sudden largesse and so the regime was handed a windfall.
No one doubts that Live Aid was born of the highest motives but many suspect that elements of the white man saviour complex figured large. Lamentably overseas aid is often used by governments and donors for virtue signalling or to assuage their guilt over a tarnished history of involvement in recipient countries.
Less benign is the way that aid is tied to political priorities. One of the world’s most significant aid receivers is Israel, a far from poor country but, especially in the United States, tied to influential lobbies which weigh on domestic politics.
Rwanda, is perhaps Africa’s most successful aid magnet. The shaky democratic credentials of the regime were not only overlooked but outright denied by Britain’s previous government which shovelled even more cash into the country as part of its batshit crazy immigration blocking scheme. The true face of the regime, never far from the surface, is now seen in full as it fuels the brutal civil war in neighbouring Congo, causing untold misery.
Then there’s the whole question of how aid money is managed, often involving vastly expensive bureaucracies and high salaries for those at the top of aid organisations. This is compounded by a predilection for listening more to the visiting officials than locals who are clearly more familiar with the situation on the ground and that’s not forgetting the drum beat of sex abuse scandals and so on.
Much of the so-called aid is in the form of loans, most of British aid follows this path but London displays laughable amateurism in this respect compared with Beijing which dishes out loan money like confetti and then imposes crippling economic payback combined with extracting political benefits for its ‘generosity’.
And let’s not forget that among donors, particularly the USA, most of the aid is spent at home buying goods and services from American companies. The biggest chunk of Britain’s ‘overseas’ aid budget has been devoted to housing asylum seekers in the UK.
The fact that so much money is wasted, misdirected and that the donor’s motivations are dubious does not mean that the whole aid effort can mindlessly be written off as a scam. Nor is it even vaguely justifiable to follow the Orange Blobs’ method of abruptly cutting off funding which inevitably leads to extreme suffering and death.
But is does mean that more can be done and almost certainly at less cost if a fundamental rethink is undertaken.
The approach of GiveDirectly, a charity previously run by the born again politician and podcaster Rory Stewart, offers a compelling different approach because it gives modest sums of money directly to recipients who can use it as they think fit. Inevitably this reduces the costs of a big bureaucracy, helps build up local economies and places cash directly in the hands of the people who will know better than outsiders how to make best use of it. This scheme, like all others, is vulnerable to fraud but the big picture is that it works.
Identifying the shortcomings of the aid business and casting doubt on its effectiveness provides fuel to the enemies of international development initiatives but those who believe that poverty alleviation is worth fighting for should not be afraid to confront the short comings of the existing aid circus and create something better.