THE END OF FOREIGN AID TO AFRICA? CONCERNS ABOUT DONOR POLICIES

Abstract

For more than three decades, a key feature of Africa, and African relations with the outside world, has been the aid relationship. In recerlt years, donors have given high priority to using aid resources to help solve Africa's poverty problems. In this article, contemporary policies and their likely impact on African poverty are put under the microscope. Six challenges to conventional donor views are presented. Firstly, the amounts of aid provided to Africa are not based on Africa's poverty needs and the gap between aid needs and aid provided is widening. Secondly, donor commitments to poverty reduction in Africa are not new; they are severely weakened by divisions among donors and large gaps remain between the rhetoric of support for poverty alleviation and the reality of sectoral aid allocations. Thirdly, there are serious doubts about whether the development model within which aid funds are located will be able in practice to 'deliver' the growth and employment generation required. Fourthly, though donors have given increasing prominence to aid which reaches the poor directly, there are doubts about the scale and effectiveness of such aid. Fifthly, the growing emphasis which donors are placing on the results and effectiveness of aid risks shifting aid towards the less poor. Sixthly, aid donors have tended in recent years to place less emphasis on politics, the power of self-interested elites and asset distribution in helping to solve Africa's poverty problems though these were dominant themes when donors last focused so vigorously on aid for poverty reduction, in the mid-1970s. The article ends with some brief proposals for addressing these problems. Foreign aid as we have known it will not survive the next 20 years. Indeed, foreign aid is likely to cease being an important global activity because most countries in both Asia and Latin America will have developed to a level where other forms of capital and expertise will be more attractive. Foreign aid will be largely confined to sub-Saharan Africa. Here, the international community will be engaged in a struggle to rescue the concept of development from being overtaken by incessant demands for humanitarian emergency assistance. Goran Hyden MASSIVE AMOUNTS OF AID continue to flow to Africa from the donor community, and the end of aid in tertns of absolute amounts of money Roger C Riddell is a Senior Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, London. This article, including its provocative title, is based on a talk given by the author to the Royal African Society. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Overseas Development Institute and its Director.