African Aid: Giving the People a VoiceAbraham Paulos reportsAid to Africa has been on the rise and so has the suffering from poverty. The call for more aid to eliminate poverty in Africa has been answered many times, but foreign aid has not entirely accomplished what it was created to do.
Africa is a vast continent, with a physical landscape that varies tremendously, from the golden sands of the Sahara all the way down to the beaches of Cape Town. And even more diverse are the 934 million people in 54 countries speaking more than 2,000 languages from an infinite number of ethnic groups, all living together in Africa. Most people know very little of Africa. Furthermore, a majority of donors think Africa is all the same, as if it was one big country. Africa receives a hefty portion of foreign aid, yet there are more than 300 million Africans living on less than a $1 a day. It is finally time to reevaluate the aid strategy.
The West has already spent an astounding $568 billion on foreign aid to Africa since the 1960s (Easterly). Yet hunger, poverty, and unnecessary suffering are ubiquitous throughout the great continent. According to economist Fredrik Erixon, between 1970 and 1995, aid to Africa increased rapidly and so did aid dependency. In many African countries, western aid is officially included in the national budget, which shows how dependent African countries are on foreign aid. During the same period, GDP per capita growth decreased in Africa and was for many years even measured in negative growth.
The regrettable fact is that most African countries are poorer today than they were at the time of their independence from colonial powers even though aid to Africa is at a historic high. Many will debate over quantity, whether too much or not enough aid has lowered economic sustainability. Others will argue that undemocratic governance, armed conflicts, and corruption lead the list of reasons why aid has not worked. Whether the evidence suggests that aid results in the eradication or perpetuation of poverty has been the catalyst of recent debate among a range of critics from high profile celebrities such as Bono and Angelina Jolie to well-known economists Jeffery Sachs and William Easterly. What is seldom debated, however, is the quality of aid.
Aid is the temporary help, mostly economic, which may be provided to governments or population groups in the event of a humanitarian crisis or to achieve socioeconomic sustainability. Development aid is "given" for economic sustainability with the hopes of eradicating aid and poverty. There is still very little known about the actual impact of the billions of dollars in aid spent on the poor in Africa. Aid is allocated to local authorities that distribute them, with unspoken discretion, to recipients from the local population. There hardly is any cultural contextualization or accountability, making aid fertile for disaster.
Aid has often been ineffective and at times, counter-productive. The failures are attributed to the political economy, fraud, and organizational problems. Though these obstacles can not be overlooked, they are often overemphasized. What is hardly highlighted is the lack of knowledge of the cultural factors that are involved with aid. As Phyllis R. Pomerantz notes in her book, Aid Effectiveness in Africa: Developing Trust between Donors and Governments, there is a profound lack of knowledge on the part of donor states about local history, conditions, and cultural norms. Pomerantz makes a well-built cultural case for why donors and governments need to start to build greater levels of trust in order for aid to be successful. She calls for greater cultural sensitivity and dialogue between giving and receiving countries. A lack of knowledge and context of social norms and history is detrimental and at times fatal for the people who receive aid. Whether it’s $10 billion or a mosquito net, if donors have no context of the people they are trying to help, their efforts will be futile.
In the article, Aid, Can It Work?, Nicholas Kristof illustrates the shortcomings of aid without the crucial knowledge of local culture and customs. He states that in southern Africa, aid groups encourage people to grow sorghum instead of corn because it’s more nutritious. However, the local people are not accustomed to eating sorghum so the aid groups distribute it to the poor as relief food. Sorghum subsequently becomes stigmatized as poor man’s food and no one touches it. Another example is in an AIDS clinic where Nevirapine, medicine to block mother-to-child transmission of HIV during pregnancy, is used to save babies. The clinic then provides the women with infant formula so that they don’t infect the babies during breast-feeding. However, further down the road are piles of dumped formula. Women seen feeding their children with infant formula are considered HIV positive and therefore stigmatized.
Are poor people being too picky? Herein lies the problem of poor Africans being perceived as beggars who can't choose and can't be listened to. They are seen as victims, helpless to make any decisions, especially decisions concerning the fate of their future. The poor in Africa are actually heroes. You have to be a hero to withstand the appalling level of poverty, to balance buckets of water for miles while carrying three babies, to crawl to empty clinics, to evade diseases with every mosquito bite and sip of water, surviving enough today to suffer tomorrow. They continue to keep hope alive in the coffin of despair: they are heroes under any standards. Africans show incredible creativity and stamina in their struggle to survive, but their struggles and strategies are often deliberately kept out of aid policy.
Today Africans go hungry as their leaders wait for Western grain (sorghum), and its poverty exacerbates as its people linger for Western charity. As opposed to donor countries solely occupied by increasing or decreasing aid, there needs to be more of a focus on the quality of aid and how to raise the output through a more comprehensive and inclusive use of Africa’s ingenuity and stamina. An alternative approach is a mature and culturally sensitive relationship between Africa and the West that places people at the center of interaction and change. This means sharing a vision of how aid can lead to transformation and constructive relationships that can be sustained over time. And finally, donors need to listen to poor people in Africa. These heroes should be able to have a say in the solution because in the end they know what their problems are.
