Chapter 18 Foreign Aid to Africa Since 1940

Abstract

African states have continued to grapple with humanitarian emergencies six decades after independence from colonial rule. The capacity to respond to humanitarian emergencies is critical if a state is to be classified as underdeveloped, developing, or developed. Foreign aid is given as a response to excruciating poverty, hunger, diseases, natural or manmade disasters, killings, destruction arising from war and holocaust of any type, challenges on educational institutions, girls’ education, poverty, and infrastructural decay. Trillions of dollars of foreign aid from multilateral agencies, America, Europe, and Asia, international non-governmental organizations to Africa have not been able to contain these challenges. Broadly, aid to Africa could be classified into developmental and humanitarian aid. The former targets long-run projections that could prevent the emergence of a humanitarian crisis that would warrant the latter. This paper examined foreign aid as a phenomenon and interrogated the two contending debates on why Africa has continued to demand aid. The first blames exogenous factors that find an excuse for the stringent conditionality of the donor agencies; the second blames the failure on endogenous factors that find African leaders culpable and then argues that aid to Africa should stop. This argument highlights African leaders’ inabilities to understand the logic of capitalism that ensues prudent management of their economy, hence corruption and the absence of horizontal accountability pervade government business. This paper shows that aid to Africa is largely given under specific titles as an aid for infrastructure, extraction of solid minerals, disaster problems, control of migrants to Europe, erosion control, peacebuilding, a war against terrorism, disease control or eradication, and general budget support (GBS), etc., however, combined discussion was made of them. Relying on secondary data sources and big push theory, the findings support the culpability of African leaders for problems necessitating consistent demand for humanitarian aid.