Last week I found myself somewhere on Buganda road, in an old, neglected library just north of Kampala. The Uganda National Public Library doesn’t lend books. But it does have a few dictionaries and reference materials. I pulled out a recent World Bank Publication, “Attacking Africa’s Poverty,” published in 2006, edited by Louise Fox and Robert Liebenthal.
I didn’t care much for the title. The language, a sort of call to arms, is so common in the development community. It asks you to help “fight poverty”, “battle hunger” and “defeat malaria”. But the battle cries have been used and abused, leaving those familiar with the lingo with empty and meaningless clichés.
I read on. The preface alone would have been enough to hook me and the essays were even better. Insightful, realistic and frank. I get the impression that the World Bank has been gifted with many people who are able to see the big picture, a perspective that quickly vanishes in these parts if you aren’t careful.
In the first chapter, they touched on a phenomenon I’ve been witnessing lately, speaking of harms that can be associated with aid and the lost decade of development:
“A good deal of the blame rests with donors countries. No region in the world is more dependent on aid, and in no other region do donors have as much say over how their aid is used. This has created the problem of donor-driven aid, in which “African governments eager to obtain as much aid as possible… have frequently ceded much of the responsibility for identifying, designing and implementing aid-funded activities to the donors, which have for the most part gladly seized the initiative”.
I found myself nodding enthusiastically, copying the passage word-for-word into my notebook, something I would be hesitant to do just a few months ago as a young idealist at McGill University.
If the book had been mine, the margins here would have been littered with the letters ‘NB’:
“The interaction of aid with local institutional development has largely been overlooked. As a result, donors have used aid to displace local institutions which were very weak anyway, and therefore easy to displace rather than build them.”
“Yes!” I thought, “This is precisely the problem.”
I paused, scanning through the footnotes. They had been quoting NYU Economist and renowned development pessimist William Easterly. I blinked. Here I was, a bleeding-heart, pro-aid Liberal, just eating this stuff up.
I haven’t yet, nor do I see myself making the switch. Jeffrey Sachs’ recent book ‘Common Wealth’ still sits proudly on my bookshelf. But I do have to give credit to Easterly. Yes, aid should be substantially increased. The developed north should follow through on their pledge to donate 0.7% of their GDP to the global south. But the way in which that aid is used to be thoroughly examined and rethought.
I looked up at President Museveni’s portrait, hanging high on the library wall. He stared back, in agreement I thought.
We absolutely cannot displace local institutions through the distribution of aid and NGO programming. Ideally, LDC governments shouldn’t cede responsibilities to NGOs. But with so few donors willing to support governments, they’re in a difficult fix. I think that donors should resume supporting developing governments, helping build and support an effective civil service.
