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.
I wholly agree. I coukvimagine the longer we stayed the less tangible was our “results”. That is why we added so many new things as we could no longer focus on vaccines or ORS - so we moved to empowerment, participation and anything shiny and hollow and immeasurable.
ReplyDeleteMy last 3 duty stations the UN was less than 5 % of ODA and ODA was a a fifth of entire budget. As government revenue (And hopefully allocation) increased the entire aid community was becoming a polite sideshow- that partygoer who did not get the hint the party has ended and stayed around to pick up cigarette butts and beer cans
ReplyDeleteRob,
DeleteThere is something almost admirable in the adaptability. Faced with the inconvenience of measurable success, we pivoted to the immeasurable with great enthusiasm. “Empowerment” does not easily lend itself to awkward questions.
Your description of the aid community as a polite sideshow feels about right. Though perhaps less polite than we imagine, we do tend to linger, glass in hand, explaining to the hosts how the party might have been better organised.
Bill Gates did not agree with The Economist's articles. He responded in a letter to the editor, published in the April 4 issue. His rebuttal is a familiar and, in many ways, admirable restatement of the aid community’s moral case: what ultimately matters are lives saved, reflected in indicators such as infant and under-five mortality. Few would dispute that fewer dead children is a good thing.
ReplyDeleteWhat is more debatable is whether this is the right lens through which to judge Africa’s long-term prospects, or indeed the role of aid itself.
The Economist’s “Open for Business” leader was not, as Mr Gates suggests, a neglect of human welfare, but rather a recognition that sustained improvements in that welfare have historically depended less on external assistance than on internally generated economic growth. The uncomfortable implication is that aid, while capable of addressing symptoms, may also risk delaying the structural transformation required to eliminate them.
Gates points to falling mortality rates as evidence of success. He is right, but correlation is not causation, and even where aid has played a decisive role, it does not follow that it provides a durable foundation for prosperity. A child kept alive by vaccines still needs a functioning economy in which to live, work, and thrive.
Indeed, one might argue that an excessive focus on mortality statistics risks reducing Africa to a humanitarian project rather than recognising it as an increasingly dynamic economic actor. The articles in question, alongside “Get Paid, Not Aid”, suggest that trade, investment, and governance, rather than aid flows, will determine whether those gains in survival translate into lasting improvements in living standards.
Africa does not merely need to survive. It needs to prosper. And that, as The Economist implied, is a different challenge altogether.
Good piece. ODA was always driven by the national interest of donor countries. In recent years it had to be increasingly and often explicitly so.
ReplyDeleteWhile you may be right that donor national interests have often shaped aid priorities, that argument only goes so far. One has to ask: what exactly was Sweden’s national interest in being the largest donor to Tanzania for over sixty years, or a major donor to Uganda for more than three decades? These are hardly obvious cases of strategic, commercial, or geopolitical gain. At the very least, such examples suggest that motivations in the donor community have been more complex than a simple calculus of national self-interest.
DeleteVery interesting perspective.
ReplyDeleteOne might reasonably ask: where, in this unfolding debate, are the intellectual powerhouses of UNICEF?
ReplyDeleteFor decades, they were anything but shy. They produced the frameworks, coined the language, and set the terms of discussion. Development was not merely practised; it was theorised, systematised, and elevated into a discipline where the correct vocabulary appeared to matter more than results. Entire careers were built on refining concepts like participation, empowerment, and ownership, each more nuanced and less measurable than the last.
From their perch, they did not always look kindly on the more pragmatic voices. Those who asked uncomfortable questions about incentives, accountability, or economic fundamentals were often dismissed as simplistic, even naïve. Development, we were told, was far more complex than that.
And yet, as the narrative begins to shift, as growth, investment, and domestic enterprise take centre stage, these same intellectual architects have grown remarkably quiet.
It is an odd silence.
One might have expected a vigorous defence of the frameworks that guided decades of policy and billions in expenditure. Or, at the very least, a candid reassessment. Instead, there is a noticeable absence from a debate that strikes at the very foundations of their work.
Perhaps this reflects prudence. Or perhaps it reflects something more awkward: that the emerging story does not easily fit the models they spent years constructing.
It turns out that reality, inconveniently, proceeds without reference to frameworks.
And the question lingers: if those who once defined the conversation no longer wish to engage in it, what does that say about the conversation they created?
Thomas, your question is naïve. No one in the aid world is about to stand up and claim that aid has helped develop Africa. That argument has disappeared because it became too embarrassing to defend. The awkward reality is that the countries most saturated with aid did not surge ahead; they slipped further behind. And it leaves the "intellectual powerhouses" in a rather exposed position. For decades, they built careers crafting ever more elaborate frameworks—participation, empowerment, ownership—concepts polished to perfection, but resistant to measurement. It was a language that elevated process over outcome. Now that the results are harder to ignore, those same voices have gone quiet. It is self-preservation. Because to engage in the current debate would require acknowledging that much of what was once presented as insight may, in retrospect, look more like an intricate vocabulary constructed to explain away the absence of progress. It is far more comfortable to retreat into nostalgia—to reminisce about the institution, the mission, the camaraderie, and yes, the generous careers it afforded many of us. There is always a willing audience for stories about how noble it all felt at the time. There is rather less appetite for asking whether it actually worked.
DeleteAnnexed to each UNICEF CPD document for the past couple of decades is usually a results and resources framework. These could be placed side by side - for 3 or 4 or 5 or 10 cycles - and would we see a trend that each "Indicative country programme output" (this is what they are called) has gradually improved each 5 years?
ReplyDeleteHere are some actual indicative outputs (things UNICEF has some control over) for recent UNICEF CPD in ESARO direct from the EXBRD Document :
6.1 Increased knowledge, attitudes, skills and agency for child protection.
6.2 Increased capacity to deliver child protection services
6.3 Increased capacity to manage the child protection system.
Or these gems:
7.1 Strengthened statistical systems to generate evidence for policy advocacy
7.2 Strengthened Public Finance Management systems to rebalance social and economic investments.
7.3 Improved social protection systems.....
I did not make these up. These are canned indicative outputs some consultant likely copied and pasted from any of the several CPDs that he or she worked on and got paid a good penny- no one in the country office or in government ever cooked up such a soup. Though they may have sat in some visioning session where they stuck something like this on a VIPP card - which is now done virtually with online whiteboard - so the consultant no longer has to take the brown paper with all the VIPP cards taped on to them and take them home and type them up to make the new framework. The post-its are already done! Like magic.
This is not new - this is something we have been doing almost on automatic pilot for 20 years - every 5 years. Ho hum.
"Trade, not aid", "Investment, not charity", "Self reliance, not dependency", "Growth with equity"... are not new concepts or arguments. The IMF/World Bank's prescription of "structural adjustment policies" (SAPs) in the 1980s emphasized an earlier version of these arguments. Under Richard Jolly's leadership, UNICEF (and the OAU) came up with the "Adjustment with a Human Face" (AWHF) in the mid-1980s to balance the excesses of the SAPs. UNICEF did not say "No SAPs" but SAPs with a human face. Let us not swing from one extreme to the other.
ReplyDeleteTo keep such a balanced view, I commend listening once again to the inimitable Stephen Lewis, who passed away recently.
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16207321-how-stephen-lewis-helped-changed-worlds-mind-aids
Kul, you are right to remind us that “trade not aid”, “investment not charity”, and “self-reliance” are not new slogans. Nor is the tension between economic reform and social protection. Richard Jolly’s “Adjustment with a Human Face” was a serious attempt to soften the harsher edges of International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies.
DeleteThat is precisely the point worth revisiting.
“Adjustment with a Human Face” was not just a call for balance; it was a claim that UNICEF and its intellectual leadership could shape the direction of development policy in ways that would produce demonstrable improvements in people’s lives. It carried both moral authority and promise of results.
Forty years on, the question is not whether the argument was well-intentioned. It is whether it worked consistently, in ways that can be clearly demonstrated.
Invoking Stephen Lewis is entirely appropriate. He was, as you say, a formidable advocate and communicator. But eloquence, however compelling, is not the same as evidence. The enduring influence of a speech is not a substitute for measurable, sustained outcomes across countries.
And this is where the discomfort lies.
If the frameworks were as effective as once believed, we would expect a robust body of comparative evidence by now showing that countries most influenced by these approaches systematically outperformed others. That evidence is not there.
So the issue is not that we risk “swinging from one extreme to another.” It is that we may never have evaluated whether the middle ground we occupied for decades delivered what it promised.
A balanced view, surely, requires not only recalling the intellectual history but also subjecting it to scrutiny. Otherwise, “balance” risks becoming less a position of analytical strength and more a refuge from an uncomfortable question: what, precisely, did that careful balancing achieve?
Let us assume that Thomas is right and much of the development aid provided through the aid industry to Africa, over the past decades, was wasted. What should donors do now?
ReplyDeleteDetlef, that is the right question, and it deserves more than nostalgia or resignation.
DeleteIf one accepts that a significant share of development assistance to Africa has delivered less than promised, the logical next step is not to do more conventional studies, but to undertake a far more thorough stocktaking than has ever been done.
Such an exercise would need to move beyond attributing failure to generic factors like “lack of coordination” or “capacity constraints,” and instead examine the political economy of aid itself. Over several decades, assistance has been shaped by multiple external actors, bilateral donors, multilateral agencies, development banks, NGOs, each with their own mandates, incentives, and accountability structures. The result has often been priorities that reflect donor preferences more than recipient country strategies.
This is not to suggest that partner governments lacked agency, but rather that the structure of the aid system made coherent, long-term economic transformation difficult to sustain. Productive sectors, economic policy, trade, and domestic revenue generation were frequently subordinated to programmatic and social-sector interventions that were easier to justify to external constituencies, with short funding cycles.
A serious review might therefore ask three questions:
1) To what extent did aid fragment policymaking rather than strengthen it?
2) How far did it displace, rather than complement, domestic accountability between governments and their citizens?
3) Did aid reduce the incentives to pursue the kinds of growth-oriented, and politically costly, reforms that have underpinned successful development elsewhere?
From that perspective, African economies might have fared better with less external intervention. Because the historical record suggests that sustained development has been driven by internally anchored policy choices, with external finance playing only a supportive role.
The implication for donors today may not be withdrawal, but a drastic redefinition. A more sophisticated approach would likely mean fewer actors, greater restraint in prescribing policy, stronger alignment with domestic priorities, even if imperfect and a clearer focus on enabling the fundamentals of economic transformation like investment, trade, and institutional credibility.
Sounds good. Could someone tell the Executive Director to go ahead?
DeleteThis reminds me - we did an evaluation once in Tanzania to assess our impact on children at district level. UNICEF Tanzania for much of the 90s and early 2000s boasted we were grounded in district based programming. In 2011 we commissioned an evaluation to assess our impact - and to do so we picked from UNICEF intervention districts and compared them to non UNICEF districts that had the same demographics (so as not to compare a poor district to a rich one) - we found out that in most cases there was no difference in core indicators for children - and in several cases districts where UNICEF had never focussed or ever sent a penny to - the children did BETTER. You can imagine the world turned upside down - from national staff to government to old timers in UNICEF - they soundly disagreed. They sputtered and hypothesized. They could not explain it nor could they accept it. The evaluation officer who oversaw the study was treated very badly in the office and ended up leaving as a result. We spent around 10 to 20 million dollars per year on these "district plans" - and we did it for many decades - how could we not do better? It was more or less swept under the rug. We actually stayed in those districts in the next 2 CPDs as far as I know. I can't help but think UNICEF global reaction of a country by country evaluation - if it showed we stammered or things got worse - we would reject it - or worse yet - come up with a HUGE laundry list of flaws in the study or confounding factors that led to the unfortunate result? Do we think we could be brutally honest ? In this donor environment I am not sure if it would be the KISS of DEATH - or a refreshing self criticism to unlock the puzzle? And if we did get such results that we did not succeed - what would we do differently than the current cookie cutter CPD approach?
DeleteRob, this is the kind of evidence that has been missing from the conversation for too long.
DeleteWhat you describe is not just an uncomfortable evaluation result; it is a stress test of UNICEF. When districts with sustained, well-funded, and supposedly grounded programming perform no better, or worse, than those without it, the problem cannot be explained away by the usual catalogue of caveats. At that point, the burden shifts from the evaluation to the institution itself.
Your account of the reaction is as telling as the findings. The reflex to dispute, to rationalise, to isolate the result as an anomaly, and ultimately to move on without course correction is not incidental. It is structural. An aid system that cannot accommodate the possibility of ineffectiveness will ignore the feedback that would allow it to improve.
The treatment of the evaluation officer is particularly revealing. When individuals are penalised for producing inconvenient evidence, the signal to the rest of the organisation is unmistakable. Under those conditions, it is hardly surprising that “cookie-cutter” approaches persist across cycles, irrespective of results.
Your question, whether the system could be “brutally honest”, goes to the heart of it. The constraint may be less about courage than about incentives. In a tightening donor environment, admitting that large, long-running programmes may have had no impact risks undermining not just future funding, but institutional legitimacy. That makes genuine self-scrutiny existential, but that is also why it may be unavoidable. The alternative is a slow erosion of credibility, where increasingly ambitious frameworks are laid over increasingly uncertain foundations. At some point, external critics will begin to draw their own conclusions.
If system-wide stocktaking were ever undertaken and produced results like the ones you describe, the real test would not be whether the findings are accepted in principle, but if they trigger discointinuation in practice.
Good grief
DeleteIs there an elegant contradiction here?
DeleteOn the one hand, the evaluation team went to considerable lengths to control for income differences, carefully matching UNICEF districts with comparators of similar poverty so as not to “contaminate” the results with the effects of economic variation. In other words, they acknowledged that wealth is a decisive factor in child outcomes.
On the other hand, the very programmes being evaluated were designed under a long-standing institutional narrative that economic growth is, at best, peripheral, something crude, capitalist, Western, and certainly less important than the finely tuned architectures of “multi-sectoral, rights-based, district-level interventions.”
So which is it?
If economics doesn’t matter very much, why the almost obsessive effort to control for it in the evaluation design? And if it does matter enough to invalidate comparisons, then perhaps it also matters enough to explain why decades of well-funded interventions did worse than places where, inconveniently, broader economic conditions were improving.
One is left with the uncomfortable impression that economics are officially downplayed in theory but very carefully accounted for when things risk not adding up.
There’s a hint here that “development is more complex than GDP” has sometimes functioned less as an insight and more as a convenient shield; invoked when growth explains outcomes better than programmes do, and quietly set aside when it doesn’t.
Not a contradiction, perhaps. Just a very selective respect for reality.
That's a good one!
DeleteGood insight Thomas - I had not thought of that - certainly in Tanzania thre are districts that traditionally did better than others / economically (maybe better soil, access to critical transport etc) and these often had better indicators for children . The question is which was the pre-condition - some smart people (from within or who lived in) figured it out and got the crop that made the most , and then with the extra income they travelled and saw that wealthier areas had better schools or health care or water- and thru brought that idea home and success led to success? Interesting? And what is it that left some districts permanently at the bottom?
Delete