How Foreign Aid is Misguided

    For perhaps decades or even centuries, the continent of Africa as a whole has been anything but a contender for competition with the accelerating development displayed in most other countries in the rest of the modern world. The separation between Africa’s nations and those in the rest of the world in economy and infrastructure has only been growing, and the subject of most of its diplomacy with such states is based heavily on receiving, with little it can offer in return. In an attempt to alleviate the issues preventing Africa from moving forward with the rest of the world, many developed countries have been pouring monetary aid into what is generally considered to be a third-world continent for several decades. Despite this, the massive amounts of money contributed to aid in Africa so far has been demonstrated to have little to no effect on growth in African countries, and perhaps even be detrimental in their development.

    One of the largest reasons for the failure of foreign aid to Africa lies in the hands of the benefactors, rather than the beneficiaries. Donors generally fail to possess an adequate perspective of the issues of Africa as ones that can be solved simply by receiving more money. In a WSJ article, Dambiso Moyo, a Zambian native herself, observes how millions of people worldwide continually advocate an increase in monetary aid to developing African countries, while their call to double the already monstrous $50 billion contributed annually remains unsubstantiated by the fact that doing so has only “left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment.” African aid can be beneficial to some extent, such as how it provides humanitarian relief to countries in the wake of a natural disaster or providing education to more children. However, monetary aid and similar forms of assistance are really only targeted at solving the immediately apparent issues that lie on the surface, are not able to significantly affect the economies and infrastructure of such countries in order to allow them to develop independently.

    Of course, despite the incompetence of donors in attempting to pour money into solving Africa’s problems, an equal portion of the blame can be placed on how African countries receiving aid have decided to deal with and utilize such aid. Some African countries, such as Ghana, Rwanda, and Tanzania, have recently demonstrated their ability to use aid in a strategic way that would allow them to make significant progress. However, the vast majority of African governments, many of which are still controlled by dictators, receiving foreign aid demonstrate a lack of maturity and responsibility, often remaining indifferent to major problems in infrastructure and economy that discourage private investors and enterprise while diverting such aid funding to empowering themselves. Based on a survey of aid donors by The Economist, it was found that “29% of delayed or lost disbursements were because of administrative problems in the donor countries.” The corruption and instability that is rampant in most developing African countries prevents a significant amount of foreign aid from being contributed to the areas that need it most, instead being pocketed by manipulative government officials.

    In the past few decades, much of foreign aid to developing African countries is just a misguided attempt at blindly solving the countless problems plaguing a location whose governments are incapable of utilizing such aid in a way that will allow their countries to make progress. Rwandan president Paul Kagame, who successfully led his country to become self-sufficient without heavy reliance on foreign aid despite a crippling civil war just 16 years prior, commented in a 2010 interview with WSJ that Africa’s success as a mostly developing continent depends on “African private sector entrepreneurs, African civic activists and African political reformers… not on what ineffective, bureaucratic, unaccountable and poorly informed and motivated outsiders do”. Instead of continually funneling in massive amounts of aid in an attempt to simply keep many sinking countries afloat, we should be focusing on how we can empower communities and the will of the people residing in such underdeveloped nations to become socially and economically independent, which is the only way that progress can truly be made.