I have re-found an article I wrote a couple of years ago for the BOND newsletter - here it is below. In it I exhort the western development community (the main readers of the newsletter) to 'catch up' with movements in the south, particularly South America. But I also note that African social movements should be checking out developments over the Atlantic. This is still very much the case. Given the swing to the soft left in Latin America, with new and creative ideas for how to manage and turn the tide of neoliberalism, it strikes me as odd that there is still so little cross-pollination of ideas between Africa and the Latins. In particular, the unique nature of Latin America's social movements makes them an interesting model for other continents to look at, particularly Africa, where a relatively weak civil society is one of the reasons for slow progress on human rights and poverty reduction.

First published in BOND’s newsletter in 2006

Every country in South America, except Colombia (a real exception because of its devastating internal conflict), is today run by a left-of-centre government. The picture is more balanced through Central America but if gone left in July – and it still just about might as protests against alleged fraud continue – the rejection of neo-liberalism in Latin America would have been almost complete. The IMF, architect of twenty years of failure to tackle poverty, is being paid off and, where possible, asked politely to leave.

The New Left (with the possible exception of Hugo Chavez’s self-proclaimed ‘revolution’ in Venezuela) is marked by a rejection of ideology and a refreshing appreciation of the complexity of linking growth, stability and poverty reduction. Learning from past mistakes, and even from some of neo-liberalism’s successes, it has embraced fiscal prudence as pro-poor, while at the same time getting actively involved in the market-place.

If, as many hope and expect, the creative policies of this new wave of leaders lead to a faster reduction in poverty and inequality than in the last two decades (not that hard, actually!) it will be largely thanks to the successful mobilisation of social movements. Bolivia is the most recent and obvious example of this trend – Evo Morales leads a government packed with former road blockers who appear as impressive in ministerial armchairs as standing by burning lorries. But even more moderate governments, like those in Brazil and Uruguay, have relied on strong social movements to ensure their transition to power.

The growth and increasing organisation of social movements in many southern countries is one of the most important dynamics of the present era. With so much uncertainty over what is actually necessary for pro-poor sustainable development, something we can all be pretty sure of is that a strong civil society, holding government and private sector more and more to account, is one thing that will speed our world’s progress towards justice.

Most new and emerging African social movements are not nearly as strong as those in Latin America, which raises serious doubts whether the type of political transformation necessary to ‘make poverty history’ in Africa will happen any time soon, irrespective of whether aid is double, debt is cancelled or donors stop forcing countries to open their markets.

So what can the NGO community in the North do to help? First we need to make working in solidarity with social movements in poor countries one of the main objectives of our work. There has been a big shift over the years in the perceived role of Northern NGOs, from primarily providing charity to an increasing focus on structural change. But so far we have focused most of our attention on trying to persuade the powerful in the North to act in the interests of the poor in the South.

While this is an important part of the jigsaw, the changes in Latin America underline the fact that the key to long term improvements in the lives of poor people is the development of movements and organisations representing their interests, coming up with sensible answers to difficult problems, and standing up to power when it blocks progress.

We must change the way we judge our successes. Traditionally we have sought to quantify campaigning success in ‘deliverables’, such as how much the G8 promises to give as aid. That is important. But so often the promises of Northern powers do not come to fruition, or what appear to be acts of generosity metamorphose into new acts of imperialism – the self-serving conditionalities attached to aid and debt relief are the most obvious example.

So we need to judge our wins in more than simple financial terms. How much have we supported the growth of movements for change, we should ask, and how has the power balance shifted? Sustainable change will come only if those who have little power today have more power tomorrow.

Politics matters. History happens slowly. We are behind southern social movements in our analysis of what creates real and long lasting change – and some of them are beginning to ask what we are up to. We need to catch up.

posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 02:28

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This article was first published in the Guardian newspaper on 27 Feb 2009

A group of foreigners turn up in a community. They are a different colour, dress differently and speak a funny language. They step off the bus and are ushered into a communal building, a school perhaps, where some local residents (elected, selected, or just pushy) explain the problems they are facing. The foreigners listen attentively, taking notes, sometimes shocked by what they hear. Afterwards, the leader of the visiting group stands up, expresses his solidarity, and promises to work with the community to help it make progress.

A typical scene in many African countries as development "experts" arrive to help plan interventions with local communities. This kind of consultation will have taken place many times in Katine. But what if this wasn't Katine? What if it wasn't Africa at all? Imagine that the community being visited is in London, or Manchester, or a poor rural area in the UK, and the visitors are from Katine, bringing their expertise, their culture, their solutions to share with people in this country.

"Development" work has changed a lot over the years. We don't call it "charity" work much any more, because we don't want to further the idea that we are giving hand-outs to the poor in a paternalistic manner. Whereas once we arrived with grand ideas to help the "undeveloped", now we don't think we know all the answers – we listen, and do our best to respond. At Christian Aid, where I work, we are proud of our partnership approach, supporting local communities and organisations to change their own lives and contexts by providing them with money, expertise and political accompaniment.

But for all the shifts in our understanding of what development means, there is one paradigm that stubbornly persists. It is still about how we in the west can help the poor in other countries. What can we give you? What can we teach you? What can we campaign on that will make the world better for you? At your service. But are we right to be so confident of what we have to offer?

I know a lot of Africans, Latin Americans and Asians who are appalled at how we live in this country and who genuinely pity us for our way of life. And they don't just pity the poor. They pity the affluent, the wealthy, society as a whole. They cannot fathom how we put our parents into old peoples' homes to sit in circles watching telly. They are sad that mental health is now as big a concern in our hospitals as physical injury. They find the number of abortions carried out each year abhorrent, to name just three examples.

And I know many westerners whose thinking has been transformed by their experiences in other countries and who believe passionately that we in the west need to learn from other parts of the world, including very poor communities, where life is approached differently. I read an article a few years ago written by a married couple who had spent 20 years working with marginalised communities in rural India before they returned to work in Glasgow. They said: "We thought we knew what poverty was, and then we came to Easterhouse."

In the Katine project, through the website, we have learned of the serious problems locals face: in education, health, gender differences, water quality and simply making a decent living. What would our experts from Katine discover on their visit to a poor British community? They might visit the parents of a young boy, the most recent victim of knife crime. They might be invited to a group for pregnant teenagers. Go around the corner to the school where smoking kids are shouting at teachers. Up the road, past the crack house, is the job centre where there are no jobs for people with no skills. A caricature, maybe, but not so far from the reality of life for many people living in Britain today. Having created a society so ill at ease with itself, so disappointing, it might seem surprising, almost arrogant, that we still choose to go abroad to try to help other people.

But it isn't arrogant or wrong. We are right to want to help people, wherever they are in the world, especially if we have played a part in their poverty (through unfair trade rules, natural resource exploitation, insistence on crippling debt repayments and so on). We have many ideas, and we have lots of money. And despite the problems in our society, we have succeeded in just as many areas as we have failed, and we are right to want to share our successes with other countries, whether in science, political freedom, culture, economic management or social policies. But we do get it wrong when we think that we have the answers. And we are arrogant when we think we have nothing to learn from the communities, like Katine, that in our generosity we want to support.

Wouldn't it be interesting for the Guardian and Amref to break open this last great mistaken paradigm of development - the one-way street paradigm - that of us helping them, and develop a system to foster communal learning across borders? What would it be that we might learn from the people in Katine? What insights might they be able to offer not only the poor communities in Britain, but the affluent as well? How might it work practically? What would catch the attention of Ugandan journalists invited to live in a London suburb, or a sink estate? Not an HIV epidemic, for sure. Nor the extreme poverty still experienced by billions of people in Africa, India and around the world and which must continue to be the main focus of our attention. But poverty nonetheless. Physical, material, mental and spiritual. Isn't it time we opened ourselves up to the kind of scrutiny we so confidently undertake in other countries?

posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 13:11

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This article was first posted on www.africanarguments.org on 14 Feb 2009

In the economic turmoil currently affecting the industrialised world, the arguments I set out in my book, The Trouble With Aid: Why Less Could Mean More for Africa, become even more pertinent. As donor governments look for ways to cut expenditure on non-priority activities, some campaigners will shift away from a call to double aid to Africa, towards trying to ensure that aid at least does not begin to tail off. But to continue to focus our attention on aid would be to ignore the mistakes of the past, and to miss the opportunities presented by the present context.

In the book I argue that campaigning for more aid should be a low priority for those concerned about poverty reduction, human rights and democracy in Africa. The optimism that aid is making a big difference to the lives of poor Africans is not shared by most analysts on the African continent. In a literature review carried out for the Overseas Development Institute, Moses Isooba of Uganda’s Community Development Resource Network found that, ‘A majority of civil society actors in Africa see aid as a fundamental cause of Africa’s deepening poverty.’ Rather than accepting the simplistic notion that more aid equals less poverty, we need to look at the evidence. All of it. In contrast to aid optimists and aid pessimists, who selectively use evidence either to support or dismiss aid, this “aid realism” recognizes that the impacts of aid are complex.

I break down aid’s impacts into four categories. Direct impacts are the easiest to measure and are the ones we hear about most in the media – how many people have been vaccinated, how many schools have been built, and so on. These impacts are very often positive. Receiving large amounts of aid also has macroeconomic consequences because large inflows of foreign money affect prices and incentives. But the two most important impacts, and potentially the most harmful, are aid conditions and aid dependency. The new global context offers new possibilities to make progress on these two vital issues which Africa campaigners must seize before the window of opportunity closes.

The policy conditions attached to aid have arguably had greater consequences in the lives of Africans than the direct impacts of the way the money has actually been spent. Within two decades the whole economic direction of a continent has changed, largely as a consequence of aid, and while some people have gained, many more have suffered as a result. But now the credibility of donor countries to insist that recipients adopt certain economic policies has been severely undermined. The failure of these donors properly to regulate the financial markets is the main cause of the current global meltdown. Meanwhile western governments have elaborated huge spending plans not only to nationalise banks, but also to protect key industries from collapse – policy options effectively denied to African countries facing far greater crises in the last few decades, at the insistence of these same governments. One of the key calls I make in the book is that the arrogance with which a specific set of liberal economic policies are being foisted on Africa must stop, and that the coming decade must be a decade of policy freedom, in which African governments are allowed to govern as they see fit. Reduced confidence in the West’s economic model brings this objective a few steps closer – campaigners should turn up the heat.

It is generally agreed that shortcomings in the accountability and effectiveness of African governments in recent decades have been a major part of the problem of low or negative growth and insignificant poverty reduction. What is less discussed, but is becoming increasingly clear, is that dependency on aid from foreign donors has undermined the development of the basic institutions needed to govern and the vital link of accountability between state and citizen. According to Siapha Kamara of the Social Enterprise Development (SEND) Foundation of West Africa, ‘the more African governments are dependent on international aid the less ordinary citizens such as farmers, workers, teachers or nurses have a meaningful say in politics and economic policies.’

The overhaul of the global financial system now being called for by the world’s leading governments provides a unique opportunity to undo some of the measures that until now have prevented Africa from maximising its development resources. One key aspect that is coming under increasing scrutiny is the complex global web of tax havens that serves no serious purpose for rich nations or poor, but is responsible for allowing dodgy deals, theft and crime to abound. Africa loses far more every year through capital flight to tax havens than it receives in aid. Plugging this leak, cracking down on corruption (including the demand side), and building better financial systems which, among other things, could make more credit available to small and medium sized businesses, would open the way to reducing dependence on aid. Such possibilities have also become more likely since the crisis began.

In many countries aid has done more harm than good. Rather than seek more of it, most African governments should set out plans to reduce the amount they receive over the next decade or so. Even when it is playing a positive role, which it certainly can sometimes, aid is far less important than a whole range of other measures rich governments need to take to support development in Africa. Campaigners should spend their limited time and resources on more important issues that would make a substantial and sustainable difference to Africa – I make suggestions for what these should be in my book.

African countries have reduced poverty when they have implemented the right policies, and when foreign governments have taken supportive measures. Aid has been at best marginal to this effort, and at worst has frequently undermined it. In 2009 the opportunity exists for African governments to make strides towards policy freedom and aid independence. It will not be easy, but the course should be set.

posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 13:03

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First published on the Guardian's Katine website on 4 Nov 2008

A year into the Katine project, is it on course to make a significant and lasting change for the people of the area? It is impossible to answer that question without a much better knowledge of the context than is possible from reading some technical documents and the odd blog, but the debate about what progress is being made in Katine makes interesting reading and brings out, among other things, one of the main tensions in development work in 2008. For all the talk of empowerment, for all the emphasis on ownership, what are kind of impacts are we really measuring?

We live in the age of the logframe, the age of tiered objectives, expected outcomes, lead and lag indicators, measurable impacts. All well and good – when used sensibly these methodologies can lead to the kind of critical thinking so vital in this era of development. But we also know from studying the history of development that the things most easy to measure (health and education statistics, water quality, income) are not necessarily the best indicators of real change. That’s why you can’t speak to a development professional for more than thirty seconds before the word “empowerment” pops out. It is a recognition that even more important than the material benefits a development project might bestow, are the less tangible changes in capacity and confidence that make a community more resilient in the face of difficult circumstances, and more able to demand and defend its rights.

So empowerment is the buzzword, but what is actually being measured by aid givers? What do the donors want to see in their annual reports? In two years time, at the end of the project, when the evaluators return with their long lists, their clipboards, and their inappropriate clothing, what signs will they be looking for that progress has been made?

AMREF’s programme in Katine has five prongs: water, health, education, livelihoods and governance. Progress on the first four of those prongs will be relatively easy for evaluators to measure and quite rewarding for journalists to photograph. Success will look like schools newly stocked with materials, better trained and equipped health professionals therapy, and new farming techniques being employed. All these things, and others, will demonstrate change for many people, a real change in living standards, a change for the better. But will they mean a change for good?

There are urgent needs in Katine, as in the rest of Africa , which require an urgent humanitarian response. But humanitarian response is not development. Development is not just change, it is sustained change. Development is not just new books, new drugs, new wells. It is the confidence that when the outsiders have left, when the development experts are working with a different community, when the donors have refused repeat funding because of the global financial meltdown, when the journalists are covering a different story, change remains.

The last of the programme’s five prongs, governance, is the most important, and the one least given to glossy photos. It is clear that AMREF understands and emphasises the importance of governance, of empowerment, of processes. What is not yet clear is how the organisation’s philosophy of empowerment will bear up when the pressure to produce “results” kicks in. As the end of the third year approaches, there will be underspends and phone calls from the finance department: “We have targets to meet; what will the donors think?” Meanwhile, journalists and the public at large will want change that can be photographed: greener fields, clean school uniforms, healthy looking faces.

It is hard to photograph empowerment. It is hard to monitor growing confidence. But it can be done. Not by independent evaluators dropping in for week before returning to their flats in South London, but by the project workers themselves, by the AMREF staff, who have built relationships with the communities and who can monitor progress over time. Only with this labour intensive type of accompaniment can real progress be measured, progress that depends on poor and marginalized communities taking power in their own hands, through better organization, better education, and a more strategic vision for their future.

Some people think organisation and empowerment are a means to an end. That is more or less the conventional wisdom. When a community is “empowered” it can better reach its real goals which relate to material benefits: better health, better food, better education, a higher income. But to turn conventional wisdom on its head for a moment, while vital in themselves, in some ways health, education and income are only the means to the real end of development work: community strength and resilience, ready to face new challenges that come its way, long after the “development project” has moved on.

The Katine project is a bold initiative which will hopefully have a lasting impact on the target communities, and might even make a difference in Uganda as a whole. It has certainly generated a much needed debate about the role of aid and the state of development in Africa . Let’s hope the project team sticks to its guns on empowerment and shows the watching world what development really means; not shiny results after just three years, but the gradual building of capacity and confidence.

posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 04:03

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It was, I presume, one of those classic tussles of which my publishers will be veterans. My first reaction to the cover design they sent me was: looks great, a clever idea carried out well graphically – but no way.


Although the book is balanced, original and propositive, I know there will be some who will assume that it is ‘anti-aid’ and negative, and try to write it off as ‘heard it all before’. My book tries to carve out new territory, not fall back on what is one of the biggest clichés in the business, that aid is just a ‘sticking plaster’. In discussions while I was writing the book and since, some commentators have argued against things I don’t say in the book, but which they assume are my arguments. I was worried by a cover that appeared to give them ammunition.

Another option I was shown was more positive. Here it is with the wrong title (trying to agree on a title was a whole other story!).


I quite liked this alternative cover, despite the Little Chef logo meant to represent food security (I presume), because it looks positive and reminds me of funky wallpaper. But the publisher insisted that the 'plaster' cover was receiving great feedback from bookshops and ultimately I bowed to their expertise.

In many ways the book does argue that aid is like a plaster. It has some very positive effects, while failing to get to the root of the problems. And aid also covers up those very problems, making it harder to deal with them. It’s just that there is so much more to it than that. While it is common to argue that aid is good but not enough, in my book I explain how aid can actually harm development in many countries. Plasters don’t do that.

But I suppose no cover image can comprehensively describe the contents of a book. So we’ll let the cover stand. And it does, at least, look good.

posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 05:27

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Some of the things I say in this book are controversial. I have already had to field angry phone calls from colleagues in the aid industry who disagree with my arguments. It is always good, therefore, to get strong endorsements for the book.

Samuel Gayi, the leader of the team that writes UNCTAD’s annual (and highly respected) Economic Development in Africa report, thinks it is a “must-read”:

“The Trouble With Aid: Why Less Could Mean More For Africa highlights the “central paradox of aid.” The book presents a challenge to both aid optimists and aid sceptics through an in-depth and perceptive analysis of the multidimensional and "complex impacts" of aid, and associated policy conditions, on the lives of the poor, institutions, and government policies of recipient countries.

“Jonathan Glennie offers a refreshing and insightful departure from the polarized views that have dominated the aid debate. He rightly points out that aid could be beneficial as well as harmful to its recipients; and "…the act of aid giving in itself undermines both state capacity and accountability", although this need not necessarily be the case and depends on how aid is used and the conditions attached to it.

“The message of the book is particularly timely as it exhorts governments to use aid efficiently and effectively for it to make a real difference to the lives of poor people at a time when donors are struggling to meet their own aid targets. The call for enhanced domestic financial resource mobilization ("minimizing outflows and maximizing domestic resources") is critical if recipient governments are to recapture their policy space that has been ceded out to donors and the multilateral financial institutions in a lop-sided aid recipient-donor relationship.

“The book is well-structured, and written in a clear, fluid, succinct, and engaging language that enthrals the reader to the end. It is a must-read not only for students of Development Studies/Economics, but also for development experts, politicians and policy makers in recipient and donor countries as it brings critical insights to even some old perspectives.”

David Woodward, the former head of New Global Economy Programme at the New Economics Foundation in London (nef) is another respected aid economist who found the book useful:

"Jonathan Glennie's excellent and immensely readable new book presents a compelling case for those of us who care about Africa not to demand ever more aid, but rather to seek the more fundamental changes in the global economy which could reduce dependency on aid and contribute to the ultimate eradication of poverty."

Charles Mutasa is the Director of the African Network on Debt and Development (AFRODAD), the largest grouping of African civil society organisations working on issues of aid and debt. He thinks the book is timely:

"At last a book on Aid by a colleague from the North that speaks frankly to the fundamentals of aid and how it is delivered. What Jonathan has given us is not just his perspectives but the new insights into the constraints on development in the Third World. The book cannot be ignored, those who ignore it, do it at their peril. This is an issue we cannot relegate to the archives or the sidelines of development."

Finally, Alex Wilkes also liked the book. Alex is the head of Eurodad, the European Network on Debt and Development. Like Afrodad it is a network of all the most important European NGOs working on aid - over 54 in 17 countries. He says:

“A very informative read for anyone interested in the future of development policy. Glennie challenges some widespread assumptions about development aid and broadens the policy agenda for campaigners. A well argued account of aid's problems and potentials and the importance of other policy agendas if we are serious about helping Africa. Readable, reasoned yet radical; Glennie urges governments, campaigners and others to look beyond aid and consider other ways to help impoverished nations and citizens stand on their own feet.”

I hope you like it too. It is published by Zed Books as part of its African Arguments series and comes out on 4 November 2008.

posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 15:55

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First posted on my Cuentos y Chismes blog on 17 April 2006, while working in Mexico City.

The now-developed world has spent much of its energy in the last few hundred years ripping off today’s poorer countries. Most Mexicans I know are well aware of this, while at the same time despising their own political elite for doing the same. That the Spanish and Portuguese plundered Latin America is not a matter of dispute – nor is the USA’s heinous involvement in some of the worst dictatorships of the modern era. Astonishingly, Haiti had to pay $21 billion (in today’s money) to the French as the price of its independence in the early 19th century – it has never recovered from its history of plunder and debt. God knows where Colombia’s gold is.

Britain has its own rather less than glorious history of taking other people’s things and justifying it in various specious ways. But we, along with other Western countries, appear more or less oblivious to this, regarding it as something like ancient history. I gave a talk recently in one of England’s top schools and asked when the students thought Britain’s last colony gained independence. The first answer was, "1905?"

When Tony Blair announced the G8’s promises at Gleneagles he said he wanted to replace our relationship of "charity" with poor countries with one of "partnership". Apart from this being nothing new – the same rhetoric has been used for decades – it was annoying that he can still get away with the idea that we are charitable. We are not. Cancelling debt is portrayed as an act of tremendous generosity – our complicity in the roots of debt and poverty is not examined. British civil society has a job to do to remind people of some of the facts as revisionist theories of Empire (such as Niall Ferguson’s dire TV series) appear to be gaining ground. In France, apparently, they have actually passed a law insisting that a positive spin is put on French history in schools.
The present emphasis in development circles in the North on ramping up aid is linked to this skewed view of our past and present. What is an important but relatively minor element in the fight against poverty has been elevated to the position of cornerstone (architects will forgive me if this is in fact impossible).

More poor people (living on less than $2 a day) live in Mexico than in the whole of Central America. But doubling aid to Mexico will mean that inflows still account for only 0.04% of GNI – insignificant. What are significant are the vast outflows, both legal and illegal, that leave Mexico every year to be invested in the USA or hidden in tax havens. What is significant is the continued failure to levy sensible taxes – tax revenue is well under 20% of GDP compared to almost 40% in the UK. What is significant is the continued pressure to free up trade, which will hurt those who most need help and investment. What is significant is the continuing fallout of Mexico’s debt crises (debts of middle income countries have grown exponentially in the last two decades – the occasional rescheduling or bailout has done little to mitigate this trend). The same is true for most countries in the region and the world – 2.3 billion of the world’s 3 billion poor live in countries that receive under 3% of their GNI in aid (most receive a lot less).

There are a few dozen countries for which aid is of great significance. Nicaragua is one of them, receiving more aid per head than almost any other country in the world – most others are in Africa or are small islands. But then another set of problems arise – might there be negative impacts of increased aid? Probably, yes. It is perfectly sensible, regrettably, to conclude that the biggest impacts of official aid to poor countries in recent decades have been the neoliberal conditions attached to it. Changes in trade rules, bad privatisations, and the liberalisation of financial flows may well have had a more serious negative impact than the benefits of more cash in hand. And aid can retard institutional development too, with most evidence suggesting that countries receiving aid have less incentive to raise taxes, perhaps the fundamental step developing countries need to make, both to increase the resources available to the public sector to finance development and to improve governments’ accountability to their citizens.

The Ugandan government presently gets as much money from aid as it does from tax revenue. Under some projections aid to Africa is set to triple by 2015 – few believe that tax revenues will follow suit. Despite serious attempts by DFID and other donors to improve accountability and ownership it is naïve to suppose that present complaints about governments being more responsive to donor preferences than to their own citizens will improve as the statistics get more skewed.

Talking of evidence, there is simply no robust evidence suggesting that aid leads to economic growth (which is unfortunately the best proxy we have in the literature for poverty reduction). Even those studies that find a positive relationship under certain circumstances cannot agree what those circumstances are. In a paper published last year Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian (respectively the head of a respected, relatively orthodox, think tank, an eminent, slightly less orthodox, Harvard economist and the IMF’s head of research) argued that "financial aid and the further opening of wealthy countries' markets are tools with only a limited ability to trigger growth, especially in the poorest countries. The tremendous amount of energy and political capital expended on these efforts in official circles threatens to crowd out attention to other ways in which rich countries could do less harm and more good." The paper goes on to suggest actions rich countries could take which would have a far greater poverty reducing impact: reforming TRIPs, giving countries far more policy space, confronting bribery and corruption by western actors, investing in technology that would benefit poor countries, and improving the cross-border mobility of labour. There are many others, most importantly helping prevent capital flight and helping ensure that foreign investment has a better impact on poverty reduction.

None of this is to discount the important role aid has played, and will hopefully continue to play, in improving the lives of millions of people. NGO aid in particular has been shown to respond to the needs of the poorest and has few harmful conditions. But we have to get real. Aid is a bit player in the history of poverty reduction. It has become the centrepiece of the new era of development because it is the easiest thing rich governments can do to respond to their electorates’ occasional horror at continuing extreme poverty (and in the case of Gordon Brown, Hilary Benn and others, an inspirational passion to end it), not the most important. In the post-9/11 context, it is also likely that aid will continue to be used to augment political partnerships. While DFID has made bold statements on reforming conditionality (largely because of immense campaigning pressure) there is little sign yet that other donor governments will follow suit.

The Independent newspaper, in one of its lucid editorials on Iraq, suggested that history students a hundred years from now would get poor marks if they claimed that the Iraq war was about WMD. They would do better if they demonstrated an understanding of the political and economic drivers of the war, oil being important. This is a helpful way to analyse the present day. While the British civil service (and public) spent the nineteenth century believing it was playing a civilising role in the affairs of its colonies, history students today understand the economic exploitation that was tied up with occasionally generous instincts. What will history students write in 2106? Is aid partly a smokescreen to disguise continued exploitation?

A lot changed in the 20th century – compassion in particular appears to have made a welcome return to humanity’s list of priorities (despite the eighties!). But whichever way you look at the world its plentiful resources, financial as well as natural, continue to satisfy the desires of only a very small minority. The world is more unequal than ever and until we become less fixated on trash TV (guilty) and mobile phones (not guilty) and more concerned with actually sorting this shameful trend out it will continue. Giving more aid will simply not do it, even if it is also ‘better aid’.

In the nineteenth century the British claimed to be "civilising" the world (you may have noticed the rhetoric of "civilised" and "uncivilised" making a triumphant comeback in recent years). I wonder whether today, despite our rhetoric of "charity", we realise how similar our practices are to those of our predecessors. The time is long overdue to explode the myth of charity.

posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 15:02

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