This article is by way of giving further attention to Dr Greg Mills's book, Why Africa is Poor," which I reviewed here. My comment this time is on a particularly important chapter: Chapter 5, Doing the Aid Garanga (hand-out). Mills examines "the business of aid" - and what a business it is, too. Pointing out that foreign assistance to Africa dropped by 50 percent in the 1990s (when the Cold War ended), Mills notes that it increased by $25 billion a year by 2010.
"Aid," he says, "gives Africa more reason to externalise its problems rather than to deal with them. Donors can make things worse: not just by diverting scarce African government resources and energies, but principally because they offer African countries and leaders an escape route from taking tough decisions."
Problems relating to aid are: "the volume that actually made it to its target; fragmentation (the number of projects aid was spent on); duplication of projects; lack of coherence between development through aid and development through increased aid access; lack of accountability; lack of scale in aid programmes (the median project size of donors was estimated at just $61,000 coupled with high administration and transaction costs; failure to align local and foreign needs and programmes; and the planning translation gap between macro (policy) frameworks and the micro (project) implementation levels."
Bit of a circus, isn't it? And Mills is by no means alone in his fault-finding. I have before me William Easterly's "The White Man's Burden: why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good." (Penguin Group. 2006). Easterly declares: "The evidence is stark: $568 billion spent on aid to Africa, and yet the typical African country no richer today than 40 years ago."
There are the "bottom billion" - the billion or so people who live on less than a dollar a day, many in Africa. Oxford University and World Banker Paul Collier remarks that aid "is the easiest thing for the Western world to do...it fits so comfortably into a moral universe organised around the principles of sin and exploitation."
At the time of writing, says Mills, "fewer than 60 percent of recipient countries had development strategies, and even fewer the means to pursue their visions. The number of multilateral aid agencies (around 230 by 2009) outnumbered donors and recipients combined. Moreover, while the average number of donors per country was growing, the average project size appeared to be shrinking, which implied ‘growing fragmentation of aid.'"
There is also the question, says Mills, about the long-term effects of aid dependency. Many economies did not develop in spite of large dollops of aid - some in Africa had become poorer. "Byzantine bureaucratic processes impede the flow of aid to those needing it, but donors often pursue goals that were completely oblivious to the needs of the poor...While it was true that much assistance given to Africa's dysfunctional states had been stolen or wasted, most of that was taken by regimes that the international community knew would steal it".
Mills adds: "The arguments for severely reducing - or getting rid of development aid altogether - was prompted by analysts such as Easterly and, more recently, in her high-profile book Dead Aid, by the Zambian-born writer Dambisa Moyo." Mills argues in some details that "shovelling" aid to Africa whatever the governance regime is not the problem as such, but that will not be pursued in this short review. Instead, here is the tale he tells of the agency employees who deliver (or don't deliver) donated aid.
"Let's have a test," challenged a colleague in Rwanda, "as to what NGO Land Cruiser next arrives in the parking lot." Mills writes: "It was no joke. The parking lot of any upmarket restaurant or hotel in any African capital speaks volumes about the neo-imperial game being played out in Africa. Four-wheel drive after four-wheel drive emblazoned with the logo of some donor agency or children's charity jostled for space.
"There they would go: Care, Enough, Concern, World Vision, Catholic Relief Services, Living Water International, Irish Aid, USAID, JICA, Christian Aid, Spread, Land O'Lakes, Send a Cow, Save the Children, send more money, save the planet, save everyone, but first, save ourselves". Even Paris Hilton promised, but failed, to come in on the act.
The cost of the "services" rendered by such foreigners, Mills explains, "was as ever borne by Africans. Their actions, fund-raising techniques and prominence strengthened the perception that Africa was unable to help itself...It perpetuated perceptions of helplessness and a victim mentality...such actions transferred power and emphasis away from the continent's decision-makers."
None of the advisers and consultants in Africa come cheaply, Mills warns. "Thinking about how much it would cost to send a team of 17 IFC (International Finance Corporation) specialists to darkest, dangerous Africa for a week or so. I would venture half a million dollars. If there were one thousand advisers visiting just once annually, and the cost of each of these projects was $25,000, then the bill for that alone was $25 million dollars. I suspect it was much more.
"While I salute their analytical entrepreneurship, the revolving naure of the business leaves me cold. Put differently, it was a great game, a great business, but a rather septic one, where similar reports are recycled endlessly. This was, of course, not the fault of the consultants alone, but rather displays a weakness in government.
"Of course, this was not all negative. If 10 percent of hotel rooms in Kigali (Rwanda) (50 at $200 per night) and the same fraction of airflights to and from the country daily (100 seats @$500 a seat) were aid types (and I can bet you the figure was substantially higher), then that was $60,000 per day or $22 million annually. To that would have to be added the amount they spent on services (car hire: about $150 daily) and food. It was a nice little income stream. If you started adding the number of religious groups then the figures started mounting further..."
As Mills remarks, among its other pursuits, aid is a great game.
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