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THREAD I was excited to see the NYT editorial board take on the colonial undercurrents in foreign aid. Then I read the piece, and wound up even more frustrated than usual about the abysmal state of this sector. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/13/opinion/africa-foreign-aid-philanthropy.html
There is nothing new here. Warnings about white saviors, skewed power relations, and the toxic effects of ill-conceived interventions have been around for decades. Here's an excerpt from Frederick Cuny's 1983 book "Disaster and development":
Although these problems are both familiar and ubiquitous, we never seem to move toward fixing them. Instead, the sector goes through cycles of sincere but ineffectual epiphanies about the need for greater "localization."
The best example is the 2016 Grand Bargain: A pledge whereby donors and aid agencies agreed to ensure that a greater proportion of aid went through local actors rather than big Western organizations.
This promise didn't just fail: It failed spectacularly. NYT cites a statistic that, from 2016-2020, the proportion of aid allocated to local partners actually decreased, from 3.5% to 2.1%. Local actors get this sector's crumbs, and the crumbs are shrinking.
To prove that progress is afoot, NYT points toward a new fund pledging "$1 million in flexible funding to African-led organizations." On one hand, this is great: $1m goes a long way in the hands of the right local groups.
On the other, let’s not give funders too much credit for doing the bare minimum required of them. We’ve all talked for years about the need for flexible funding to local partners, and $1m is an utterly trivial sum by the standards of large grant-makers.
Last, I was disconcerted by the article's exclusive focus on Africa. Many of the largest recipients of US humanitarian funds are elsewhere, notably in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan where such aid has become an accompaniment to military intervention.
Through that bizarre omission, the piece seemed to reproduce the simplified, stereotyped vision of humanitarian aid as being all about feeding hungry kids in Africa.
This is not to dismiss the piece: It's thoughtful and sincere, and it's great that NYT took on this rather niche topic. But it also captures how simplistic and repetitious this conversation tends to be. How to move forward if we're stuck rehashing the same old obvious problems?
For more on the insidious impact of top-heavy funding structures, check out this 2017 piece by me, @PeterHarling & @RosalieBerthier https://www.synaps.network/post/syria-aid-top-down-partners-un
