Africa Beyond Aid: Thomas Ekvall

An Industry Faces Its Own Redundancy

For those of us who have spent years in the aid business, often congratulating ourselves along the way, recent coverage in The Economist may make for rather uncomfortable reading. Three articles in its March 21 edition, “Open for Business,” “Get Paid, Not Aid,” and “Meet Africa’s Richest Man”, paint a picture of Africa as a continent which has fared rather well after significant aid cuts and whose future looks increasingly independent of us.

One can almost hear the collective throat-clearing across conference rooms in Geneva, New York, and Nairobi.

The implication, though, is difficult to ignore: Africa’s economic prospects may improve not because of aid, but despite it. This is awkward. Aid, after all, is not merely a policy tool; it is an industry, complete with career paths, reporting frameworks, and an ability to declare success regardless of outcomes.

For decades, we have framed aid as indispensable. Without it, we implied, development would stall, institutions would crumble, and progress would reverse. Yet the emerging narrative suggests something far less flattering: that sustained inflows of external assistance may have dulled incentives, weakened accountability, and crowded out precisely the kind of entrepreneurial energy now being celebrated.

Aid has always come wrapped in the language of partnership. In practice, it has often resembled something closer to supervision, occasionally benevolent, frequently intrusive, and rarely modest. Governments learn quickly where their real obligations lie. When budgets depend more on donors than taxpayers, the logic of accountability follows the money. Citizens, understandably, come second.

Meanwhile, the stories highlighted by The Economist point to a different model: African-led growth, investment-driven expansion, and the rise of serious domestic capital. Not perfect, not evenly distributed, but undeniably real. It turns out that when markets function, even imperfectly, people respond with innovation, risk-taking, and ambition. Who would have thought?

This is not to argue that aid has achieved nothing. It has saved lives, delivered services, and provided temporary relief where none else was available. But temporary measures have a way of becoming permanent fixtures, especially when entire institutional ecosystems depend on their continuation.

The more uncomfortable question is whether aid, as currently structured, has become part of the problem it was meant to solve. By insulating governments from their citizens, by distorting local priorities, and by perpetuating a narrative of dependency, it may have delayed the very transformation it sought to accelerate.

What follows from this is not a dramatic call to abolish aid overnight, bureaucracies rarely appreciate such dramas, but a quieter, more subversive proposition: that success should be measured by the extent to which aid becomes unnecessary.

This, admittedly, creates a certain professional dilemma.

If Africa is indeed “open for business,” as The Economist suggests, then the role of the aid community must shift, from central actor to supporting cast, from financier to facilitator, and, eventually, to spectator. One suspects this transition will be embraced with all the enthusiasm of an industry asked to engineer its own irrelevance.

Africa, it seems, may be ready to move on.

The question is whether we are.