"Whose Aid Is It?"

Adriana Banderas raises poultry as part of World Bank-supported producer’s alliance in La Eugenia, Valle de Cauca, Colombia.

Sixty years of foreign aid has shown that donors alone—no matter how well-intentioned or generous—cannot end poverty and hunger. A poor country’s development depends on national leaders with vision and the will to follow through and gain the support and cooperation of their citizens. President Obama reiterated this view on his first visit to Africa in 2009. Speaking before the Ghanaian Parliament, Obama said, “We must start from the simple premise that Africa’s future is up to Africans.” The president’s remarks could be summarized in these two sentences: “Aid is not an end in itself. The purpose of foreign assistance must be creating the conditions where it’s no longer needed.”¹

Used effectively, foreign aid can help poor countries develop more quickly and inclusively. History has proven this time and again. Presidents from both the Democratic and Republican parties view aid primarily as a catalyst for development—not an end in itself. In 2002, when President George W. Bush introduced one of his signature aid programs, the bold Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), he said virtually the same thing as Obama: “The goal of our development aid will be for nations to grow and prosper beyond the need for any aid.”²

There is a range of views about the efficacy of foreign aid programs, but nearly everyone agrees that there is considerable room for improvement. The question really boils down to “Whose aid is it?” Critics of conventional foreign aid assail a system in which it is the norm for donors to tell recipient countries how their aid must be used.

A variety of considerations shape the relationships between donors and aid recipients—rarely are the relationships just about reducing poverty and the burdens associated with it. Other factors include security concerns, a shared past due to colonialism and Cold War alliances. Regardless of the back story, this much is always true: Donors have the aid and the receiving country needs it, sometimes desperately. It’s not hard to guess who traditionally calls the shots.

Since the turn of the 21st century, donors and developing countries have been deliberately trying to reinvent the business model and make it closer to a true partnership, with aid recipients designing their development agenda and donors structuring assistance packages to support the country’s priorities. And there has been progress, although slow.³ This chapter discusses why a partnership model should in fact be the goal and how the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future, can create this kind of development program.

Issues