An Introspective Look at the Failure of International Aid in Africa

Grand plans of poverty alleviation and development have failed, but the industry behind these plans has become a monster, which is hard to restructure let alone get rid of. It is hard because partly there s a lot of money and interest involved in countries which sponsor the industry as well as in aid recipient countries, and partly because of collective ignorance about the motives of global welfare-ism (BBC)...

An Introspective Look at the Failure of International Aid in Africa 

Pan-African Medical Doctors & Healthcare Summit (PAMDHC) 

Overview

Policy makers can be motivated by different factors to import or export policies, institutions and programs from or to another political setting. Thus, there would be more than one reason for policy elites to engage in policy transfer processes. It is natural tendency to look abroad, to see how similar problems were addressed, and to share ideas to draw lessons when past or present solutions are not found at home. Even at the level of application alone, it is largely overlooked that international models may enter societies through a proliferation of programs that hinder the growth of open and effective processes, which may retard indigenous experience and capacity. 

The 1980s saw a major change in the lending-policy framework of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The World Bank began to reorient both its development policy models and its relation with the IMF and developing countries. This situation gave birth to the structural adjustment lending, in which conditionality was linked to policy reforms in Africa (Gibbon, 2000:122-123) 

Critical problems concerning the philosophical and practical entrenchment of development systems in Africa receive scant attention. The fundamental issues of how the concepts, standards and practices of aid could be generated and sustained under historically hectic conditions, and the manner in which they are likely to gain systemic integrity and autonomy as well as broad social currency are inadequately addressed. 

• Does aid enter local processes as an external ideology, constructing and deploying its concepts in sterile abstraction from the immediacies of indigenous traditions, beliefs, and values?
• In the case of rural communities, do development ideas addressing poverty come into play in total opposition to, or in cooperation with historic values and sentiments? 
• In the struggle for aid effectiveness, do leading stakeholders equate the articulation of their ideas and agenda with the production of broad-based concepts, norms and goals that should govern the direction of national development at all levels? 

The Washington Consensus, the Bible of overseas aid, has since acquired a pejorative sense. It has been the target of sharp criticism arguing that it is a way to open up less developed countries to investments from large multinational corporations. As of 2007, several Latin American countries are led by socialist or other left wing governments, some of which have adopted approaches contrary to the Consensus set of policies...

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