Africa is poor. If we send it more money it will be less poor. It seems perfectly logical, doesn't it? But it isn't. Along with its many benefits, government aid to Africa has often meant more poverty, worse basic services and damage to already precarious democratic institutions. Calls for more aid are drowning out pressure for action that would really make a difference for Africa's poor. Rather than doubling aid to Africa, it is time to reduce aid dependency. This book will show you why.
I was at the European Development Days in Stockholm last week on a panel with IMF, World Bank, recipient country and European development agency representatives. Some of the usual issues came up (conditionalities, harmonisation etc) but the biggest applause came when I said what I thought might be provocative, given the overwhelmingly aid business audience. "When", I asked, "will development agencies and recipient countries set out a timetable to bring aid to an end?" Radical suggestion? Apparently not given the reception it got. Even some panel members appeared open to the idea. In a way, that's not very surprising I suppose. We all recognise that aid that doesn't end is not really aid. But it seems people in the aid industry are more open than ever to the problems of long term and deep aid. I left feeling optimistic that new thinking was being welcomed by the aid community.
posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 13:37
This article was first published in the New Internationalist on 1 Sept 2009
I knew this would happen. The intellectual initiative on African development seized by a free-market ideologue, now listed by Time Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
It is clear what side of the fence Dambisa Moyo is sitting on. The foreword to her book Dead Aid is written by leading conservative historian Niall Ferguson, and her write-up in Time was written by none other than (ex-President of the World Bank) Paul Wolfowitz. In her eight years with Goldman Sachs, I doubt she was a subscriber to the New Internationalist.
Some people think the danger of Dead Aid is that it will lead to reductions in aid. That isn’t the danger. As I argue in my book, we need to set out a plan to reduce aid in the medium term, rather than continue the traditional clamour for aid increases in the face of growing evidence of the harm it can do. No, the danger of Dead Aid is that just when the opportunity exists to fundamentally challenge the extreme form of capitalism that has held sway over Africa, and most of the world, for the last three decades, we lose the intellectual initiative by clinging to an outdated position on aid.
Despite the many flaws in her book, Moyo’s success is a good thing. We need to debate aid. I wrote my book because I was frustrated by the lack of intellectual rigour behind calls for huge aid increases to Africa. While most of my colleagues in the ‘aid industry’ have responded positively, some argued that it was ‘risky’ to question the unalloyed benefits more and more aid will offer to the African continent.
Now they have been hit with Dambisa Moyo, who is selling more books than Jeffrey Sachs could dream of and whose polemic – however far removed from the facts – is gaining ground in influential circles. The risk for those of us who realize the flaws in the neoliberal, market fundamentalist approach is that we stop being trusted by the public as we persist in the same tired defence of aid based not on the facts but on habit, self-interest (if you work in a charity, you are somewhat linked to aid increases) and a kind of ‘something must be done’ mentality.
Tempting trap
The main technical criticism of Moyo’s book must be that it is very prone to exaggeration. Hers is not a serious analytical study but an anti-aid polemic of the kind common in the conservative media in the US, where the only facts used are ones that bolster a case, and exaggeration is considered par for the course – after all, the other side is doing it. Exaggeration is a very tempting trap for an author to fall into. A thoughtful assessment is rarely as blistering a read as a no-holds-barred romp through the evils of one thing or another. And publishers (and publicists) want to sell juicy rants. My book on aid to Africa has a plaster on the front in the shape of the African continent. As you can see if you look at my blog (www.thetroublewithaid.org), there were other, more positive, options for both title and cover. But my publisher insisted, and I agreed in the end, that if I wanted the book to sell I would have to bow to some of the pressures of a competitive market.
In the book itself, however, I was obsessive in my attempt to present a balanced approach to the subject of aid to Africa, because that is what I think both western and African publics deserve. In contrast to aid optimists (like Sachs) and aid pessimists (like Moyo), I emphasize that the impacts of aid are complex, some good, some bad. Only when we assess these impacts dispassionately and systematically can we have any real expectation of making a positive and sustained impact on human rights, development and poverty reduction in Africa. I call this approach aid realism. Aid realism means not getting swept away by the ethical clamour to ‘do something’ when a proper analysis shows that what is being done is ineffective or harmful. And it means not bowing to an ideological anti-aid position in the face of the rights and urgent needs of millions of people.
Currently I manage a Christian Aid programme in Colombia. I have worked in the NGO sector for over 10 years but have never been as inspired as now, as I see the way donated money is being spent to bolster the movement for change in this country. Without the presence of our and similar international agencies, the organizations, communities and individuals that make up that movement would be far weaker, battered on all sides by the violence of the state and illegal armed groups, and many might simply have ceased to exist.
Dependence and independence
We are not giving charity, we are helping build a movement for human rights and justice. Justice for the four million women and men displaced from their homes by armed groups seeking wealth and power. Justice for the victims of violence and persecution. Justice for the 50 per cent living in poverty in an upper-middle income country. Moyo doesn’t get that at all. She seems to think that everything will be solved if we open a few banks and liberalize some more. But Latin America has shown that change comes when the movement for justice is strong. And when aid strengthens that movement, it is doing a vital job. Our programme in Colombia is part funded by the Irish and British governments and publics, and part by the EU. So, yes, aid can do good. We need more of that kind of aid. The big problem is with very large amounts of government-to-government aid.
Moyo’s critique of aid dependency is one of the areas where she and I are in agreement. The harm done by very high levels of government-to-government aid to the development of effective and accountable governance in Africa is one of the great silences in the aid debate. While politicians – from Tony Blair with his 2005 Africa Commission to Barack Obama in Ghana earlier this year – demonstrate an increased awareness of the importance of state institutions in development, they do not appear to understand the harm aid itself does to governments that rely on it too heavily. Moyo does – and the issue has seldom had so much coverage.
Radical humility
The way to respond to Moyo, then, is not to reel off more misleading ‘millions of lives saved per billions of dollars spent’ scenarios. The western public has stopped believing them, while the African public knows they are unhelpful exaggerations. The aid community needs to publicly recognize the flaws in aid and the harm it can sometimes do. And then it needs to defend the good things about aid.
After which, it needs to move on to more important issues. The irony of this debate is that aid is not really the issue at all. Both aid optimists and aid pessimists exaggerate the importance of aid. No country has ever developed because of aid, and while relatively small amounts of private giving do lead to the kind of programme I am proud to run here in Colombia, they are not going to change the world. Countries develop when they get their policies right. We should be campaigning on tax havens, on climate change, on human rights, on trade justice, and on policy freedom. Although Moyo hardly mentions the issue, it is aid conditionality, more than aid itself that has caused so much damage to Africa. Under intense pressure from donors, the entire economic direction of the continent has changed since the early 1980s. For such a large and diverse group of countries, you would expect a range of responses to the various problems of poverty and development. Instead the response has fitted the Washington-designed blueprint of privatization and liberalization. That is no coincidence, and while lock-in trade deals have played their part, aid has probably been the main instrument used by rich countries to get what they want. Efforts have been made since the late 1970s to rein in aid conditionalities, but they are still just as harmful as ever.
I am not concerned about Moyo critiquing aid; she is right to. What concerns me is the certainty with which she states what African countries need to do to develop. Certainty is also a key part of marketing a book. You generate a scandal and then dive right in. But it is galling to see in this case, precisely because she utters with such certainty prescriptions that have been shown so utterly to have failed.
At a recent debate in London, hosted by the International Rescue Committee, Moyo repeatedly asserted that ‘we know what works’. We don’t know, and that kind of attitude, so common among the donor community for the last few decades, is exactly what we have to move away from.
Now is the time to demonstrate radical humility; not to compromise on principles, but to adopt an attitude of creativity and respect. Now is the time to trust people and their governments and parliaments, for all their many problems, more than blueprints flown in on a laptop.
So I make the following appeal. The pull of neoliberalism has been broken. Its failings scar Africa and shame the West. Development is more complicated than neoliberals (and neo-cons) would have us believe. It is time for a new era of intellectual openness. In contrast to 30 years of clamping down on choice, let the decades ahead be the decades of choice, of experimentation again, and of sovereignty.
I knew this would happen. The intellectual initiative on African development seized by a free-market ideologue, now listed by Time Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
It is clear what side of the fence Dambisa Moyo is sitting on. The foreword to her book Dead Aid is written by leading conservative historian Niall Ferguson, and her write-up in Time was written by none other than (ex-President of the World Bank) Paul Wolfowitz. In her eight years with Goldman Sachs, I doubt she was a subscriber to the New Internationalist.
Some people think the danger of Dead Aid is that it will lead to reductions in aid. That isn’t the danger. As I argue in my book, we need to set out a plan to reduce aid in the medium term, rather than continue the traditional clamour for aid increases in the face of growing evidence of the harm it can do. No, the danger of Dead Aid is that just when the opportunity exists to fundamentally challenge the extreme form of capitalism that has held sway over Africa, and most of the world, for the last three decades, we lose the intellectual initiative by clinging to an outdated position on aid.
Despite the many flaws in her book, Moyo’s success is a good thing. We need to debate aid. I wrote my book because I was frustrated by the lack of intellectual rigour behind calls for huge aid increases to Africa. While most of my colleagues in the ‘aid industry’ have responded positively, some argued that it was ‘risky’ to question the unalloyed benefits more and more aid will offer to the African continent.
Now they have been hit with Dambisa Moyo, who is selling more books than Jeffrey Sachs could dream of and whose polemic – however far removed from the facts – is gaining ground in influential circles. The risk for those of us who realize the flaws in the neoliberal, market fundamentalist approach is that we stop being trusted by the public as we persist in the same tired defence of aid based not on the facts but on habit, self-interest (if you work in a charity, you are somewhat linked to aid increases) and a kind of ‘something must be done’ mentality.
Tempting trap
The main technical criticism of Moyo’s book must be that it is very prone to exaggeration. Hers is not a serious analytical study but an anti-aid polemic of the kind common in the conservative media in the US, where the only facts used are ones that bolster a case, and exaggeration is considered par for the course – after all, the other side is doing it. Exaggeration is a very tempting trap for an author to fall into. A thoughtful assessment is rarely as blistering a read as a no-holds-barred romp through the evils of one thing or another. And publishers (and publicists) want to sell juicy rants. My book on aid to Africa has a plaster on the front in the shape of the African continent. As you can see if you look at my blog (www.thetroublewithaid.org), there were other, more positive, options for both title and cover. But my publisher insisted, and I agreed in the end, that if I wanted the book to sell I would have to bow to some of the pressures of a competitive market.
In the book itself, however, I was obsessive in my attempt to present a balanced approach to the subject of aid to Africa, because that is what I think both western and African publics deserve. In contrast to aid optimists (like Sachs) and aid pessimists (like Moyo), I emphasize that the impacts of aid are complex, some good, some bad. Only when we assess these impacts dispassionately and systematically can we have any real expectation of making a positive and sustained impact on human rights, development and poverty reduction in Africa. I call this approach aid realism. Aid realism means not getting swept away by the ethical clamour to ‘do something’ when a proper analysis shows that what is being done is ineffective or harmful. And it means not bowing to an ideological anti-aid position in the face of the rights and urgent needs of millions of people.
Currently I manage a Christian Aid programme in Colombia. I have worked in the NGO sector for over 10 years but have never been as inspired as now, as I see the way donated money is being spent to bolster the movement for change in this country. Without the presence of our and similar international agencies, the organizations, communities and individuals that make up that movement would be far weaker, battered on all sides by the violence of the state and illegal armed groups, and many might simply have ceased to exist.
Dependence and independence
We are not giving charity, we are helping build a movement for human rights and justice. Justice for the four million women and men displaced from their homes by armed groups seeking wealth and power. Justice for the victims of violence and persecution. Justice for the 50 per cent living in poverty in an upper-middle income country. Moyo doesn’t get that at all. She seems to think that everything will be solved if we open a few banks and liberalize some more. But Latin America has shown that change comes when the movement for justice is strong. And when aid strengthens that movement, it is doing a vital job. Our programme in Colombia is part funded by the Irish and British governments and publics, and part by the EU. So, yes, aid can do good. We need more of that kind of aid. The big problem is with very large amounts of government-to-government aid.
Moyo’s critique of aid dependency is one of the areas where she and I are in agreement. The harm done by very high levels of government-to-government aid to the development of effective and accountable governance in Africa is one of the great silences in the aid debate. While politicians – from Tony Blair with his 2005 Africa Commission to Barack Obama in Ghana earlier this year – demonstrate an increased awareness of the importance of state institutions in development, they do not appear to understand the harm aid itself does to governments that rely on it too heavily. Moyo does – and the issue has seldom had so much coverage.
Radical humility
The way to respond to Moyo, then, is not to reel off more misleading ‘millions of lives saved per billions of dollars spent’ scenarios. The western public has stopped believing them, while the African public knows they are unhelpful exaggerations. The aid community needs to publicly recognize the flaws in aid and the harm it can sometimes do. And then it needs to defend the good things about aid.
After which, it needs to move on to more important issues. The irony of this debate is that aid is not really the issue at all. Both aid optimists and aid pessimists exaggerate the importance of aid. No country has ever developed because of aid, and while relatively small amounts of private giving do lead to the kind of programme I am proud to run here in Colombia, they are not going to change the world. Countries develop when they get their policies right. We should be campaigning on tax havens, on climate change, on human rights, on trade justice, and on policy freedom. Although Moyo hardly mentions the issue, it is aid conditionality, more than aid itself that has caused so much damage to Africa. Under intense pressure from donors, the entire economic direction of the continent has changed since the early 1980s. For such a large and diverse group of countries, you would expect a range of responses to the various problems of poverty and development. Instead the response has fitted the Washington-designed blueprint of privatization and liberalization. That is no coincidence, and while lock-in trade deals have played their part, aid has probably been the main instrument used by rich countries to get what they want. Efforts have been made since the late 1970s to rein in aid conditionalities, but they are still just as harmful as ever.
I am not concerned about Moyo critiquing aid; she is right to. What concerns me is the certainty with which she states what African countries need to do to develop. Certainty is also a key part of marketing a book. You generate a scandal and then dive right in. But it is galling to see in this case, precisely because she utters with such certainty prescriptions that have been shown so utterly to have failed.
At a recent debate in London, hosted by the International Rescue Committee, Moyo repeatedly asserted that ‘we know what works’. We don’t know, and that kind of attitude, so common among the donor community for the last few decades, is exactly what we have to move away from.
Now is the time to demonstrate radical humility; not to compromise on principles, but to adopt an attitude of creativity and respect. Now is the time to trust people and their governments and parliaments, for all their many problems, more than blueprints flown in on a laptop.
So I make the following appeal. The pull of neoliberalism has been broken. Its failings scar Africa and shame the West. Development is more complicated than neoliberals (and neo-cons) would have us believe. It is time for a new era of intellectual openness. In contrast to 30 years of clamping down on choice, let the decades ahead be the decades of choice, of experimentation again, and of sovereignty.
posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 04:55
I went to the US Embassy Independence Day party yesterday (celebrated a day early) – the huge military compound was transformed into a theme park for the night. The Colombian guests sang their national anthem with gusto, but the Americans gave a pretty poor rendition of theirs (just as the British usually do). Sometimes listening to the American anthem sung tiredly, you can forget what a majestic song it is. Never moreso than in the mouth of Marvin Gaye. Nothing moves me more than watching his version on YouTube. I discovered it a few years ago and started watching it obsessively, singing it while making coffee, humming it in meetings, driving my friends to distraction by incessantly repeating the exquisite penultimate line. I was thrilled by the bravery and creativity that took an iconic, slightly rowdy, not very beautiful tune and turned it into a sexy R&B melt-in-your-mouth chocolate bar, relying only on a drum-machine and the odd chord. Marvin Gaye is one of the great musical geniuses of the last century and his phrasing is amazing.
The occasion is moving too. Addicted to drugs and sex, Marvin is only months away from a cataclysmic argument with his mad dad that left him dead (shot) just as he was reclaiming his status as THE great black artist in America. You have to watch the video. He comes out in front of the crowd as they wait for the NBA final in his shades and for the next three minutes or so holds them in the palm of his hand. The crowd. Not his shades. He is everything a great artist should be. Natural, cool, surprising, complete. Building slowly and effortlessly he lifts the emotion of the song as it climaxes, ever so slightly putting his shoulders into it, and never losing control of his mesmerising voice. An astonished and enthralled crowd is blown away.
When I watch his perfect rendition it reminds me what the United States was meant to be, what it could have been, before it all went so wrong. It is not like the Jimi version, the other classic, which sums up an ecstatic era of rebellion and new possibilities. It is thoughtful and soulful. And painful. Because the slightly colourful but still noble aspirations so clearly expressed in the words of the song are set, in my mind at least, against the reality of racism and inequality at home and violent imperialism abroad.
In 1983, while Marvin was singing in a basketball stadium, Ronald Reagan’s White House was busy funding and supporting some of the most deadly regimes of the twentieth century. Pinochet was still murdering and raping his way through Chile; further north, the murderous gangs of El Salvador ravaged peasants, human rights leaders and priests; next door in Guatemala the civil war that had raged in the hills ever since a US-sponsored coup in 1954 was getting more and more brutal; Nicaragua was at war with a US proxy army – the contras. In Colombia in 1983 armed bands of paramilitaries, strongly linked to the army (trained, inevitably, by the US) were remerging. Their previous emergence in the 1960s had been an explicit part of US counter-insurgency strategy in the country. The history books will record that any perceived threat to US economic interests in twentieth century Latin America was brutally put down, with not even a cursory glance at the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
But it was not always thus. In the early years of South American independence from Spain, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, with their iconic constitution, their audacity in imagining a new way of running a state, had inspired Simón Bolívar and his followers as they wrote the constitutions of Gran Colombia (which initially included Venezuela and Ecuador), Peru and Bolivia. Although it soon became a strong trading competitor threatening Colombian economic development, the political vision of the leaders of the United States was one of the main reasons that Colombians were brave enough to fight renewed attempts by the Spanish to reclaim their colony. The Star Spangled Banner is a kind of weird but ultimately, I think, quite an evocative homage to that vision. And the word spangled pleases me.
Skip on roughly 150 years and a slightly drug-muddled Marvin is wowing the crowd while economists down the road are laying the plans for the neo-liberal era. The United States, which had grown to untold prosperity in the late 19th and early 20th century using all manner of policies to protect its growing manufacturing and agricultural base from competition, led the assault on the rights of today’s poor countries to do the same. Policy choices that didn’t fit in with those defined in Washington were not, and are still not, an option for those countries reliant on aid to keep their economies afloat. We are only now emerging from more than two decades of narrow-minded policy enforcement which led to slow or no growth in most of Latin America and the reversal of years of development and poverty reduction in post-colonial Africa. Meanwhile profits for US companies grew at record levels as the US forced other countries to accept rules and policies that suited its well-developed economy and multinational companies.
When Marvin sang of freedom he probably didn’t have Latin America in the forefront of his mind nor, if I am honest, would he have been meditating deeply about trade liberalization and the price of chickens in Ghana. Knowing as I do his other works I am yet to find reference to the killing squads of Central America or a detailed critique of World Bank structural adjustment policies.
But he was certainly aware of the barriers and injustices poor people still faced in his own country, the land of the free (he sings that word with his voice stretched, his muscles flexed), not least black people, with the added burden of centuries of racism to contend with. And I am sure that some of those listening in the stadium heard his crystal vocals as a political call for black people to reclaim as their own a nation they had helped build as slaves. Marvin was not only sex in dark glasses. He was also a civil rights icon. And this, his final televised performance, was his last word: “This is not your country, it is mine too.”
The anthem ends with a question: “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” If anyone at the US Embassy was thinking of the words at all last night, the final line came out as less of a question, more of a declaration, taken for granted. But in Marvin’s mouth the question is still very much alive. And the answer today, as in 1983, is “No”.
But there are some hopeful signs, the most obvious being the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency, carried to victory by a generation of Americans yearning for something different. For change. Obama will find it hard quickly to turn around the rapacious military and industrial machine that the USA has become, and he doesn't seem to understand the harm done by American economic policy to the poorest countries (let's hope he reads my book). But he appears to want his country to live up to the universally inspiring values of its founding fathers, and he has himself inspired a generation of Americans to begin again on the road to justice and a decent life for all, not just at home but abroad as well. He came out reasonably quickly in condemnation of the coup d'etat in Honduras that has everyone sensible on the continent worried again about the real strength of democratic guarantees in Latin America.
Is it too much to hope that the Iraq disaster, growing state powers elsewhere in the world, and a tentative consensus among the “experts” about the disastrous hubris of the neo-liberal experiment, might mean change is on the way? Let’s hope the new president has a listen to Marvin and a good think about where his beloved country, with its blessed ideals, went wrong.
The occasion is moving too. Addicted to drugs and sex, Marvin is only months away from a cataclysmic argument with his mad dad that left him dead (shot) just as he was reclaiming his status as THE great black artist in America. You have to watch the video. He comes out in front of the crowd as they wait for the NBA final in his shades and for the next three minutes or so holds them in the palm of his hand. The crowd. Not his shades. He is everything a great artist should be. Natural, cool, surprising, complete. Building slowly and effortlessly he lifts the emotion of the song as it climaxes, ever so slightly putting his shoulders into it, and never losing control of his mesmerising voice. An astonished and enthralled crowd is blown away.
When I watch his perfect rendition it reminds me what the United States was meant to be, what it could have been, before it all went so wrong. It is not like the Jimi version, the other classic, which sums up an ecstatic era of rebellion and new possibilities. It is thoughtful and soulful. And painful. Because the slightly colourful but still noble aspirations so clearly expressed in the words of the song are set, in my mind at least, against the reality of racism and inequality at home and violent imperialism abroad.
In 1983, while Marvin was singing in a basketball stadium, Ronald Reagan’s White House was busy funding and supporting some of the most deadly regimes of the twentieth century. Pinochet was still murdering and raping his way through Chile; further north, the murderous gangs of El Salvador ravaged peasants, human rights leaders and priests; next door in Guatemala the civil war that had raged in the hills ever since a US-sponsored coup in 1954 was getting more and more brutal; Nicaragua was at war with a US proxy army – the contras. In Colombia in 1983 armed bands of paramilitaries, strongly linked to the army (trained, inevitably, by the US) were remerging. Their previous emergence in the 1960s had been an explicit part of US counter-insurgency strategy in the country. The history books will record that any perceived threat to US economic interests in twentieth century Latin America was brutally put down, with not even a cursory glance at the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
But it was not always thus. In the early years of South American independence from Spain, the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, with their iconic constitution, their audacity in imagining a new way of running a state, had inspired Simón Bolívar and his followers as they wrote the constitutions of Gran Colombia (which initially included Venezuela and Ecuador), Peru and Bolivia. Although it soon became a strong trading competitor threatening Colombian economic development, the political vision of the leaders of the United States was one of the main reasons that Colombians were brave enough to fight renewed attempts by the Spanish to reclaim their colony. The Star Spangled Banner is a kind of weird but ultimately, I think, quite an evocative homage to that vision. And the word spangled pleases me.
Skip on roughly 150 years and a slightly drug-muddled Marvin is wowing the crowd while economists down the road are laying the plans for the neo-liberal era. The United States, which had grown to untold prosperity in the late 19th and early 20th century using all manner of policies to protect its growing manufacturing and agricultural base from competition, led the assault on the rights of today’s poor countries to do the same. Policy choices that didn’t fit in with those defined in Washington were not, and are still not, an option for those countries reliant on aid to keep their economies afloat. We are only now emerging from more than two decades of narrow-minded policy enforcement which led to slow or no growth in most of Latin America and the reversal of years of development and poverty reduction in post-colonial Africa. Meanwhile profits for US companies grew at record levels as the US forced other countries to accept rules and policies that suited its well-developed economy and multinational companies.
When Marvin sang of freedom he probably didn’t have Latin America in the forefront of his mind nor, if I am honest, would he have been meditating deeply about trade liberalization and the price of chickens in Ghana. Knowing as I do his other works I am yet to find reference to the killing squads of Central America or a detailed critique of World Bank structural adjustment policies.
But he was certainly aware of the barriers and injustices poor people still faced in his own country, the land of the free (he sings that word with his voice stretched, his muscles flexed), not least black people, with the added burden of centuries of racism to contend with. And I am sure that some of those listening in the stadium heard his crystal vocals as a political call for black people to reclaim as their own a nation they had helped build as slaves. Marvin was not only sex in dark glasses. He was also a civil rights icon. And this, his final televised performance, was his last word: “This is not your country, it is mine too.”
The anthem ends with a question: “Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” If anyone at the US Embassy was thinking of the words at all last night, the final line came out as less of a question, more of a declaration, taken for granted. But in Marvin’s mouth the question is still very much alive. And the answer today, as in 1983, is “No”.
But there are some hopeful signs, the most obvious being the rise of Barack Obama to the presidency, carried to victory by a generation of Americans yearning for something different. For change. Obama will find it hard quickly to turn around the rapacious military and industrial machine that the USA has become, and he doesn't seem to understand the harm done by American economic policy to the poorest countries (let's hope he reads my book). But he appears to want his country to live up to the universally inspiring values of its founding fathers, and he has himself inspired a generation of Americans to begin again on the road to justice and a decent life for all, not just at home but abroad as well. He came out reasonably quickly in condemnation of the coup d'etat in Honduras that has everyone sensible on the continent worried again about the real strength of democratic guarantees in Latin America.
Is it too much to hope that the Iraq disaster, growing state powers elsewhere in the world, and a tentative consensus among the “experts” about the disastrous hubris of the neo-liberal experiment, might mean change is on the way? Let’s hope the new president has a listen to Marvin and a good think about where his beloved country, with its blessed ideals, went wrong.
posted by Jonathan Glennie @ 16:33
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.
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
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?
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
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.
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
Previous Posts
- This blog has moved
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