Aid who benefits?

The word 'development' has become a sacred cow that can never be questioned and neither can the effectiveness of the vast, global development industry. But who, if anyone, is benefiting from the aid industry? Why is aid still required in Africa after more than 60 years of independence? Is 'development', according to the West's notion of the word, helping or hindering Africa? This month's Cover Story examines the many sides of the thorny aid question and asks if aid, as we understand it today, is really working?

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The Development Myth

Over the past five decades at least, the concept of 'development', as defined largely by the West and some multilateral organisations such as the World Bank and the IMF, has been considered a sacred cow never to be questioned. But after the repeated failures of development policies based on these concepts, there is a growing body of thinkers who are challenging the entire aid and development agenda as we know it. One of them is Rasna Warah (right), who has edited a new anthology on the subject, Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits. *

I first started having doubts about the relevance of the development industry while I was conducting an interview with Mberita Katela, a woman living in Laini Saba, the densest and poorest section of Nairobi's Kibera slum.

She earned an average daily income of 50 Kenya shillings (less than the proverbial dollar a day) selling sukuma wiki (a cheap, popular local dish consisting mainly of the vegetable kale) and cigarettes to her neighbours. The translation of sukuma wiki is 'pushing the week', i.e. making do until the weekend when you hope to eat something more substantial.

It was March 2002 and I had gone to Kibera to do what they call a 'qualitative time-space analysis' of how slum dwellers spend their time and how much physical space they occupy while carrying out their daily chores.

This activity was part of a larger and much broader global slum analysis being carried out by the UN's Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) where I worked at the time.

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As I sat on one of two small stools in Mberita's tiny wattle, daub and tin shack--which was only marginally bigger than my bathroom at home--I found myself asking her the most intimate details about her life, questions that I myself would not have entertained: what she ate for breakfast, how many people she shared her shack with and, most important of all, where she defecated.

Through this exercise, I found out that she shared one stinking pit latrine with some 100 of her neighbours and that the latrine was located less than 10 metres from her shack, which she shared with her daughter and two grandchildren. Needless to say, the stench of raw sewage permeated the air within and around her neighbourhood.

Mberita's story--or rather, the state of her living conditions--was published in a UN-Habitat publication, and was subsequently picked up by the American author and urbanist Mike Davis, who used parts of the story in his provocative book Planet of Slums to illustrate the dehumanising living conditions experienced by the world's urban poor.

Meanwhile, Mberita has remained oblivious of the fact that her name now appears in a book, magazines and in cyberspace (a Google search yields a number of results). The publication of her story had little or no impact on her living conditions; the most it did was create what development workers like to call 'awareness' among some people and gained me a few Brownie points within the development fraternity. I had turned her into one of those people who, in the words of British columnist A A Gill, "slip through the cracks of good intentions" to become "slices of pie chart and exclamations".

I was subconsciously doing what many people in the so-called development industry do: I was objectifying her, seeing her as part of a problem that needed to be solved so that she could be neatly compartmentalised into a 'target group' category.

This allowed me to perceive her as being 'different' from me and bestowed on her an 'otherness' that clearly placed her as my inferior, worthy of my sympathy. Like most professionals working in the development industry, I had failed to see that my work and the structures within which I operated were self-serving.

Slum tourists

In recent years, Nairobi's slums have gained the attention of a host of celebrities, and Kibera has joined the rank of a 'must-see' tourist site in Kenya, along with the Maasai Mara and Mount Kenya. US President Barack Obama, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Britain's PM Gordon Brown have all walked through the muck and human waste that pave Kibera's lanes.

After Hollywood immortalised the slum in The Constant Gardener, interest in Kibera has grown so much that enterprising local travel agents have started including slum tours in their itineraries. One such travel agency, which even has a branch in Canada, offers what it calls the Kibera Slums Tour, along with honeymoon packages, luxury safaris and mountain hiking tours.

The visit to Kibera is described as a 'charity tour' where tourists are expected to contribute a minimum of $30 to orphanages, schools, HIV/Aids patients or individual slum households of their choice.

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Visits to Kibera reached a crescendo during the 2007 World Social Forum held in Nairobi when anti-globalisation activists turned up at the slum to demonstrate their solidarity with the downtrodden. Kibera was also the first stop in UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's first official visit to Kenya in February 2007.

The slum residents, however, are not amused; Car-washer David Kabala told Reuters: "They see us as puppets; they want to come and take pictures, have a little walk, tell their friends they've been to the worst slum in Africa. But nothing changes for us.

The death of development

A few years after my interview with Mberita, and after I had left the UN to pursue a writing career, I became increasingly obsessed with what is referred to as 'post-development theory'-the notion that 'development', as it is known today, is a skewed concept that harms rather than benefits communities.

Post-development advocates have not had a serious hearing in the last six decades. This is because since the birth of the UN in 1945, the notion of development has become a sacred cow within the international community, one that cannot and must not be questioned.

Not too long ago, when a dissident intellectual named Ivan Illich questioned the very idea of development (which he even had the audacity to refer to as "planned poverty"), he was quickly dismissed as a provocateur.

His ideas, however, were propagated by various critics of development, including the environmentalist and author Wolfgang Sachs, who claimed that "the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape" and that "delusion and disappointment, failures and crime have been the steady companions of development".

Sachs even went as far as saying, "It is not the failure of development that has to be feared, but its success."

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These critics argued that development is more than a socio-economic endeavour; rather, it is "a perception that models reality, a myth that comforts societies and a fantasy that unleashes passion".

In the past two decades, a variety of academics, economists and development practitioners, such as Susan George, Majid Rahnema, Arturo Escobar and Rajni Kothari, among others, have made concerted efforts to show the dangers inherent in current development paradigms and practices. Their arguments revolve around three basic premises:

1) That the development business and all those who work for it are motivated by the need to impose new systems of domination on people of the Third World--in other words, that development is just another way that colonialism can be perpetuated without being labelled oppressive;

2) That development models, such as those imposed by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other donor agencies, favour the rich at the expense of the poor and are, therefore, instrumental in perpetuating poverty in the so-called developing world; and

3) That the world-view, intentions and mindset of development practitioners are paternalistic, arrogant and totally ignorant of the reality of poor people's lives. The notion of 'development' is also rejected because it is closely associated with 'Westernisation'.

The word development itself is fraught with self-negation. As the Mexican economist Gustavo Esteva (who calls himself "a de-professionalised intellectual") observes, the word serves as a constant reminder to people in the so-called developing world of what they are not--i.e. developed. So almost all the people living in Africa, Asia and Latin America--regions that are not yet deemed to be 'developed'--are assumed to be living in "an undesirable, undignified condition" that they can only escape by becoming "enslaved to other's experiences and dreams".

Implicit in the word 'development' is the idea that it is a state that can be achieved through technical interventions--more schools, more water points, more roads, more hospitals--that are only achievable through more aid.

The UN system routinely labels countries as 'least developed' or 'developing' based on national data and statistics on income, literacy and longevity.

This classification forms the basis of most UN and World Bank reports and is used by rich nations to determine which countries qualify for aid and debt relief. So modern-day Egypt, Iraq and India, places where civilisations thrived long before the birth of Christ, are now deemed "developing countries" by the vast pool of statisticians, demographers and economists employed by international development agencies.

Countries and regions that were once pioneers of innovation, art, and science, whose people invented the wheel, operated complex irrigation systems and built architectural marvels such as the Taj Mahal, now happily accept this classification because it allows them to bargain more effectively for foreign aid.

Failures of aid are largely attributed to corrupt governments, whose excesses can be curbed through what the World Bank terms as 'conditionalities'.

As the veteran international development specialist Thomas W Dichter has noted, organisations handling large amounts of money need structures through which the work and the money can be channelled; unfortunately, it is these same structures that limit and compromise development because, like many bureaucracies, the structures becomes more important than the work itself. Moreover, unlike normal business ventures, the development industry is perhaps the only industry in the world where results--or the bottom line--do not determine whether or not it will survive.

If results mattered, then many donor agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) would have closed shop years ago when confronted with the fact that their work had neither reduced poverty in many countries, nor had it made people living in them less dependant on aid--which ultimately, should be the main objective of any organisation aiming to lift people out of poverty.

The trouble with Africa

Africa seems to elicit the lion's share of the world's foreign aid--and the world's sympathy--even though, in terms of absolute numbers, there are more poor people living in Asia, notwithstanding the recent economic success of India and China.

Although the proportion (not the number) of people living in back-breaking poverty is highest in Africa, the exclusive international focus on the continent may have to do with the fact that African problems are easier to "compartmentalise". Whether it is HIV/Aids, famine or conflict, Africa offers a canvas that can be painted into neat little boxes. "Because Africa seems unfinished and so different from the rest of the world, a landscape on which a person can sketch a new personality, it attracts mythomaniacs," observed Paul Theroux.

A 17-year-old American student who, when asked why she wanted to go to Africa, is reported to have said, "There are a lot of problems (in Africa), but you can group them together. I can organise Africa in my head, in terms of poverty, droughts, even governments."

This does not seem to apply to Asia. For instance, after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the Indian government refused any kind of foreign humanitarian assistance. On the contrary, India offered aid to other affected countries, since it viewed itself as a regional superpower that did not need handouts from foreigners.

African governments have no hang-ups about begging for foreign aid; in fact, many measure their success by their ability to attract foreign funds.

Some sub-Saharan African countries even base the bulk of their national budgets on remittances by foreign donors, not on domestic revenues. It is only in recent years that countries such as Kenya have weaned themselves away from donor-funded budgeting, an achievement that Kenya's Finance Minister loves to boast about on the annual Budget Day. The national budgets of neighbouring Uganda and Tanzania, however, are still very much tied to how much donors contribute to them.

The resultant loss of sovereignty is a huge price to pay considering that official development assistance (ODA)--money that governments of advanced economies designate for foreign aid programmes--comprises less than 1% of rich countries' Gross National Product (GNP).

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Taxpayers in the United States, Sweden, United Kingdom or Japan hardly feel the pinch. By May 2007, for instance, it was estimated that the US Congress had approved a total of $510bn since the U.S. government began its global war on terror in 2001 (roughly $85bn a year), most of it to fund its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This is almost the total amount of aid that Africa has received from donor countries in the last 40 years.

What is worse is that this kind of defence spending does little to boost development in the countries where it is spent. For example, Pakistan, one of the bigger beneficiaries of the US war on terror, has been receiving up to $150m a month in American aid, ostensibly to fight Al Qaeda, yet two out of every three women in Pakistan remain illiterate.

Aid-dependency also ensures that rich countries retain some control over their former colonies. When the aid is given in the form of a loan (which normally comes with stringent and often punitive conditionalities attached), the control is easier to exercise. As Susan George, author of A Fate Worse Than Debt put it: "Debt is not a financial problem. It is a political problem. If you cancelled all the debt of the poorest countries tomorrow, the international financial system would not even notice. However, debt is extraordinarily useful for the North; it is much better than colonialism as you don't need an army etc. to keep people in line, and you don't need the people. But you get tremendous political advantage because you have continuous low prices for raw materials, everyone is forced to export at the same time, and you have political control over the government ..."

China's recent engagement with Africa, if not monitored closely, could also end up perpetuating poverty on the continent. However, the good thing is that the Chinese do not view their interaction with Africa as charity, but as a business opportunity. As a young American woman who has spent many months in China explained to me: "When mzungus [white people] see a barefoot African child on a dirt road in his village, they call the number on the bottom of the screen and give a dollar--a sort of instant absolution at a very bargain price. A Chinese sees that same image and sees a market of one billion consumers who need one billion pairs of shoes."

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Afro-Sino trade is estimated to have grown from $4bn in 1995 to $40bn in 2005 and is expected to rise to $100bn by 2010.

Corrupt elite and failing institutions

UN reports routinely report that many African countries are poorer now than they were in 1980, at the end of what was dubbed 'the second UN Development Decade', despite being among the biggest recipients of official development assistance in the last 40 years.

Although the growth of slums in African cities is the result of a variety of factors, including rapid urbanisation and the after-effects of the World Bank-IMF-led structural adjustment programmes of the late 1980s and 1990s, which reduced or eliminated subsidies on basic services in urban areas, their growth is also symptomatic of a deeper reality: without slums, many cities in Africa would not function.

African cities rely on the relatively cheap labour provided by slum dwellers to man their factories, to construct buildings, to clean their streets and to generally make the economy grow. Slum dwellers, in turn, need the employment generated by cities to survive.

Slums are, therefore, sites of immense opportunity and enterprise, where dreams of escaping poverty are first nurtured--even if, in their present condition, they are also sites of life-threatening diseases and environmental degradation. Economists admit that while some level of inequality is tolerable, even desirable, in the early stages of a city's development, prolonged inequality can have devastating social and economic consequences that can cancel out economic growth. An angry, hungry and dehumanised slum population does not make a productive labour force--and is prone to violence and crime. Beijing, on the other hand, is one of the most equitable cities in the world. Dichter believes that development in Africa has failed because it has been targeting the wrong things in the wrong way:

"Increasingly we know that the keys to development are neither tangible nor involve much 'doing'. If development professionals were successful in fostering institutions, attitudes and laws and in enhancing human resources, we--as professional developers--would not have to do things like build schools or roads. The institutions of a functioning society would see to it that they got built."

* The above article by Rasna Warah is an edited excerpt from the anthology Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits, published by AuthorHouse (UK) ISBN 978-1-4343-8603-8 and edited by Warah.

This book makes us reimagine our world and our place in it, and forces us to reconsider the value of 'development' and what it really means to the people of Africa.

The contributors to this anthology include scholars, bankers, development workers, international journalists and many others. Many are convinced that it is time to declare the death of development as an idea, as an ideology and as an industry. The essays in this book come from various writers. This extremely accessible collection does not attempt the grand sweep, raging aimlessly against the development machine with general complaints that fail to hit their mark. Rather, it is a focused peep into international, regional and local attempts to develop Africa, thereby providing the reader a much-needed African perspective on the development industry and why it has failed so miserably in lifting millions of people out of poverty. A full review will appear next month.