Thought Leadership

2006 - Africa Beyond Aid

This programme - comprising a series of commissioned papers and run in collaboration with the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and Danida - considered a new strategic paradigm for aid in Africa.

Instead of focusing on increasing aid as a key development strategy - the conventional wisdom - this programme examined both what it would take to end aid to Africa and what an Africa beyond aid would look like in policy terms. Fundamentally, in the light of the July 2005 G8 commitment to double aid to Africa to US$50 billion by 2010, how can aid be better used, with an eventual focus on decreasing aid for at least some countries?

The first workshop, which took place in Potsdam, Germany, on 3-4 April, 2006 focused a spotlight on many of the issues surrounding Africa Beyond Aid.

A second event was held in Brussels in June 2007, from which a final compendium emerged.

While taking care to avoid the sweeping notion that aid is bad per se (because it is not), the project found that there are multiple contradictions in aid as a development tool.

• Aid seeks the means to develop from outside to supplant the inherited colonial state yet fuels an externalist 'assistance' mindset and all the antagonism and harmful stereotyping that this engenders.

• Seeks to build internal capacity but can produce a set of negative incentives including rent-seeking, crowding out the private sector, and a belief that one cannot 'go under' since there will always be an aid lifebelt. Also, aid can perversely be linked to failure rather than success, if money is primary donated according to level of per capita income.

• It seeks to ensure African development while it gives some donors an excuse not to make tough domestic concessions on trade. Similarly African leaders might not feel the imperative to trade or die - the global and more recently Asian route to development - since they feel their path to survival and development is not trade but aid. We may not be setting the right incentives for leaders.

• Aid regimes propose complex solutions to similarly complex problems, but big aid pushes a la Gleneagles encourage (if not entrench) a notion that silver bullet 'all-in' answers to Africa's problems can be engineered.

• Aid can have a diversionary impact. Although it may seek to emphasise African responsibility, it can produce the opposite effect by distorting and even undermining the accountability link between domestic constituents and their government. For instance, aid projects usually ignore parliaments altogether, thereby reducing the ability of African legislatures to hold the bureaucracy accountable.

• There is a desire to act on a co-ordinated African response (e.g., the EU-Africa partnerships) but such a strategy undermines the need for differentiation and risks African solidarity over effectiveness.

• There is a clash between governance and democracy conditionalities and the updholding of donor interests, a contradiction heightened by both the war against terror and the advent of the China-Africa aid/investment phenomena. This tension may also be described as the distinction between aid as a tool of development and governance on the one hand and as a tool for foreign policy on the other.

• Finally, there is the paradox between the media/pop-star/celebrity-academic emotional effect on the aid business and doing the right empirical thing.

So what? This leads to a number of things that Africa and the donors can do.

The full report can be downloaded here.