Ken Opalo’s view
Most international development experts correctly do not subscribe to the idea that aid has zero benefits. There are lots of examples of how aid has helped improve human welfare at scale around the globe. Here, public health is arguably the gold standard. Diseases that killed hundreds of thousands of kids a year have been eliminated or contained. Millions have been kept alive and granted a ticket to a normal life expectancy with interventions like the US’ HIV/AIDS program, PEPFAR.
You can clearly see all this in data. Maternal and infant mortality rates are trending downwards, with low-income countries reaching levels of life expectancy well above what would be predicted by their income levels. No impartial observer would deny this progress.
However, there is also no denying that the age-old aid paradigm — currently getting dismantled by wealthy donor countries (this trend extends well beyond the United States) — was far from perfect.
Aid dependency robbed these countries of the chance to cultivate policy autonomy; ensured that their ability to deliver services did not grow alongside their politics and institutions of accountability; and created conduits for undue interference in these countries’ political and social affairs.
Discussion of these truths have been missing in the ongoing handwringing about the future of foreign aid from the United States and others. As far as the impact of aid goes, commentary in much of the Western press has mostly focused on the plight of individual aid beneficiaries and the potential loss of US (and Western) influence around the globe.
It has been left to commentators from low-income countries to emphasize the ills of aid dependency and to point out the glaring failures of most aid projects outside the health sector. These conversations need to merge. Only then will everyone be in a position to imagine future forms of development assistance that are mutually beneficial and that do not cultivate aid dependency or create a pretext for interference in low-income states.
Everyone must be clear-eyed about the fact that this might be the end of the long-established aid model. And it’s imperative to prepare for what comes next. From the perspective of low-income states, nobody should have any illusions of rebuilding what existed before — the prior aid system achieved some good outcomes (notably in health and humanitarian relief), but was ultimately not good enough to help these countries grow and achieve structural economic change.
Furthermore, a good share of ongoing aid cuts will be permanent, with donor countries intensifying their use of whatever aid is left (both bilateral and multilateral) to more nakedly advance their narrow foreign policy goals and geopolitical agendas.
In the new paradigm, it will be up to recipients to ensure that aid complements their own developmental goals. Otherwise, they will expose themselves to being used and abused by donors for narrow geopolitical ends. Unfortunately, the reaction of most low-income countries to recent aid cuts suggest that the latter outcome is more likely than the former. That, too, is a sad legacy of decades of aid dependency.
Ken Opalo is an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is also a Senior Fellow at New America, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development, and a Research Fellow in the Economics Department at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.