On the urgent need for a pivot to spending more time trying to supporting specific countries interested in boosting their state capacity; and catalyzing commercial revolutions in low-income countries.
I have long enjoyed your writing, Ken. And I tend to agree with you often, including on many of the points you make here. Indeed, some of your points are highly consistent with recommendations senior career USAID officers recently published in an open letter on the future of U.S. assistance - recommendations that we were never even invited to offer by the current U.S. administration. Which gets to my point ... The decision to dismantle USAID had nothing to do with doing development assistance "better." Had that been the case, the administration would have had a plan for replacing the old system. It did not and still does not as far as I can tell. It would not have summarily discarded initiatives like Power Africa and Prosper Africa that were, in fact, facilitating significant private investment in Africa with great ROIs/leverage ratios on U.S. assistance.
All the words spilled about how to do development assistance better - more focused investments, greater partner-country ownership, more commitment and accountability on the part of partner-country governments, enabling greater private investment, etc. - all take as given that we care about supporting structural change in developing countries. But I don't think we can make that assumption anymore, at least not in the United States. What I see from this administration is not, "How can we better align assistance with developing-country priorities?" Instead, I see, "Any (limited) U.S. assistance needs to advance (a very narrow, short-term, highly transactional view of) U.S. interests, regardless of developing-country priorities." Of course, we know that assistance can do both effectively - advance (generally, longer-term) U.S. interests while also supporting developing-country priorities. But that argument is facing an extremely serious challenge right now, and if it's lost, all of the recommendations for how to do development assistance better won't matter.
P.S. If you haven't yet, check out John Norris's fantastic book, "The Enduring Struggle," for a handful of compelling historical examples of how aid was instrumental in supporting structural transformation of economies, in many ways along the lines of what you suggest here.
Brian, You articulate so much of what I feel so effectively. Everyone absolutely needs to play the hand we've now been dealt. There's no other choice. But pretending that the new U.S. approach is being built in a systematic way or that the motive for the end of USAID was any more sophisticated than Homer Simpson's dictum that "It's fun to smash things," is an error. There was a need for real transition is some areas, especially PEPFAR, and I think there was some energy for it too. This was just vandalism.
Thanks, Dan. The battle we're facing - and the higher-order problem that I hope we're trying to solve for - is not about how to do development assistance "better," but, rather, whether U.S. foreign policy should be guided by our values at all. Of course, it was never only about our values, but as long as they were a factor, it made sense to debate how best they should be reflected in the delivery of U.S. development assistance. But if we lose the battle for the "soul" of U.S. foreign policy, then this discussion within the development community about how to do assistance better - greater partner-country ownership, accountability, etc. - doesn't really matter. And though we've gotten pretty close to that existential moment for development assistance in the U.S., I don't believe the battle has been lost, yet.
Curious for your take on the church in this conversation, Ken, given its role in building national-scale systems (with community roots) in education and health long before the NGO-ization wave, that are still there today. This model avoided the fragmentation of endless projects, with a (non-state version of) big ambition with its long term local elites. And I assume it helped sustain cross-county (donor-recipient) coalition through grounding solidarity in shared values and ideology, not just a tyranny of "evidence". Wonder what's still relevant for us now from this, and where new values coalitions can emerge from.
In general, I am a fan of faith-based orgs because they tend to be rooted in communities and play the very long game (even though they, too, can be hijacked for nefarious purposes).
Dr Opalo, I always breathe a sign of relief when I read your work: he gets it, he is pragmatic, there is a way! In my book Aid Inferno I show how aid was never going to foster economic development in the Rostow fashion advertised, and in many cases did more harm than good as a consequence. Less money isn’t necessarily a bad thing therefore and it’s time to acknowledge the limitations of aid, its dire track record with a few bright spots, and a future approach that focuses solely on on the latter mechanisms.
Thanks for this piece. I always learn something from your work. I do have a question. In part two you note that "those who substituted for the state in the NGO-ization wave of the last 35 years partially contributed to the weakening of the African state." Could you recommend some literature on that point? It makes intuitive sense, of course, that external actors assuming government responsibilities would allow governments to skate, but it's the opposite of what I've observed in the health sector. (Note: Health is absolutely not my area of expertise, but it is my wife's.) In country after country, global organization around the AIDS crisis, particularly PEPFAR, has strengthened government capacity rather than weakened it. I'm also a bit curious about the 35 year time frame. That corresponds with a wave of democratization, and I can't help but wonder if the disturbing implication is that democracy has undercut governance.
Wow. This is really fine, always good, this is even better. A point that kind of gets lost is the element of "investing in soft power" that Bermeo mentions as a purpose of aid. A point one has to ask is "soft power" with who? It is easy to delude oneself that if one does "good" aid defined by "cost effective" projects that benefit the poor this will lead to "soft power"--but that is beyond naive. In many ways making aid "better" at the way in which philanthropy defines it makes it worse for the political purposes of official aid.
Good read Ken. What’s your thoughts on Disaster Risk Finance (a necessary) being the foundation of international development aid and all other forms of development aid will be a contingent and on a minimal scale. That is to say that international aid will push towards funding only catastrophe relief and not day-to-day survival.
"Second, Sarah Bermeo wrote a short description of the purposes of foreign aid from the perspective of the U.S. government (and which applies to other donors as well). These include, fulfilling popular mandates in support of solidarity with foreigners; providing global public goods (like stopping the spread of infectious diseases); creating markets and strategic economic allies; investing in soft power; and increasing coercive leverage over others. This is an important piece to inoculate all who naively get carried away with the supposed benevolence of aid..."
There's a bit of a paradox here, because several of these purposes stop working if people don't view the aid as benevolent. If recipients don't consider the aid as benevolent, and donors learn this, it doesn't achieve as much solidarity with foreigners. It doesn't create allies or soft power. Recipients who think to themselves "you know, this aid isn't truly benevolent, it's really just a scheme for manipulating us" will not regard the donor country better, hence the donor country's soft power is not increased, hence the aid fails to achieve the goal.
As an American, I used to be really enthusiastic about the idea of helping people in Africa. When PEPFAR got cut, I looked over social media to see what the reactions where. Almost every reaction was one of the following: (a) "That's alright guys, we can stand on our own two feet, we don't need any of that Western aid" or even (b) "That Western aid was actually a secret conspiracy to ruin our countries. It is good that it is gone." It was quite difficult to find anyone expressing any gratitude for the millions of dollars the US has poured into Africa over the years, or even expressing sorrow that the money was no longer being provided. Overall, this experience caused my enthusiasm about helping Africa to drop dramatically. I realized that even if I was to work super hard and donate a ton of money to charities helping Africa, no one will ever feel any gratitude. People will either (a) not notice, (b) take it for granted, or (c) cynically assume I have some sort of ulterior motive. What's the point in working to help someone who can't even bother to say thanks?
I dont know how we help adjust structures in places like drc short of the slow boring work of supporting democracy, human rights and so on. In the meantime dont we save the most lives with the few dollars we have on emergency protein enhanced maize porridge for those starving in the handful of war torn and dysfunctional countries like eastern congo?
Engaging and thought-provoking as always! I wonder how you would fit in the ebbs and flows in enthusiasm for budget support. In the early 2000s budget support was seen in donor circles as the aid modality of the future for many of the reasons you discuss – places recipient govt in drivers seat, avoids parallel implementation structures etc. Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness was all about this. My impression was that the World Bank’s aim was to do as much of it as feasible (although less so for big infrastructure projects). Might be worth thinking more about why/how pendulum swung back. To some extent the ‘soft power’ proved problematic. Budget support flows tended to stop and start in ways that undermined sound budget management, whenever a recipient government did something politically unpalatable to donor country electorates (corruption, human rights etc.).
I have long enjoyed your writing, Ken. And I tend to agree with you often, including on many of the points you make here. Indeed, some of your points are highly consistent with recommendations senior career USAID officers recently published in an open letter on the future of U.S. assistance - recommendations that we were never even invited to offer by the current U.S. administration. Which gets to my point ... The decision to dismantle USAID had nothing to do with doing development assistance "better." Had that been the case, the administration would have had a plan for replacing the old system. It did not and still does not as far as I can tell. It would not have summarily discarded initiatives like Power Africa and Prosper Africa that were, in fact, facilitating significant private investment in Africa with great ROIs/leverage ratios on U.S. assistance.
All the words spilled about how to do development assistance better - more focused investments, greater partner-country ownership, more commitment and accountability on the part of partner-country governments, enabling greater private investment, etc. - all take as given that we care about supporting structural change in developing countries. But I don't think we can make that assumption anymore, at least not in the United States. What I see from this administration is not, "How can we better align assistance with developing-country priorities?" Instead, I see, "Any (limited) U.S. assistance needs to advance (a very narrow, short-term, highly transactional view of) U.S. interests, regardless of developing-country priorities." Of course, we know that assistance can do both effectively - advance (generally, longer-term) U.S. interests while also supporting developing-country priorities. But that argument is facing an extremely serious challenge right now, and if it's lost, all of the recommendations for how to do development assistance better won't matter.
P.S. If you haven't yet, check out John Norris's fantastic book, "The Enduring Struggle," for a handful of compelling historical examples of how aid was instrumental in supporting structural transformation of economies, in many ways along the lines of what you suggest here.
Brian, You articulate so much of what I feel so effectively. Everyone absolutely needs to play the hand we've now been dealt. There's no other choice. But pretending that the new U.S. approach is being built in a systematic way or that the motive for the end of USAID was any more sophisticated than Homer Simpson's dictum that "It's fun to smash things," is an error. There was a need for real transition is some areas, especially PEPFAR, and I think there was some energy for it too. This was just vandalism.
Thanks, Dan. The battle we're facing - and the higher-order problem that I hope we're trying to solve for - is not about how to do development assistance "better," but, rather, whether U.S. foreign policy should be guided by our values at all. Of course, it was never only about our values, but as long as they were a factor, it made sense to debate how best they should be reflected in the delivery of U.S. development assistance. But if we lose the battle for the "soul" of U.S. foreign policy, then this discussion within the development community about how to do assistance better - greater partner-country ownership, accountability, etc. - doesn't really matter. And though we've gotten pretty close to that existential moment for development assistance in the U.S., I don't believe the battle has been lost, yet.
Curious for your take on the church in this conversation, Ken, given its role in building national-scale systems (with community roots) in education and health long before the NGO-ization wave, that are still there today. This model avoided the fragmentation of endless projects, with a (non-state version of) big ambition with its long term local elites. And I assume it helped sustain cross-county (donor-recipient) coalition through grounding solidarity in shared values and ideology, not just a tyranny of "evidence". Wonder what's still relevant for us now from this, and where new values coalitions can emerge from.
In general, I am a fan of faith-based orgs because they tend to be rooted in communities and play the very long game (even though they, too, can be hijacked for nefarious purposes).
Dr Opalo, I always breathe a sign of relief when I read your work: he gets it, he is pragmatic, there is a way! In my book Aid Inferno I show how aid was never going to foster economic development in the Rostow fashion advertised, and in many cases did more harm than good as a consequence. Less money isn’t necessarily a bad thing therefore and it’s time to acknowledge the limitations of aid, its dire track record with a few bright spots, and a future approach that focuses solely on on the latter mechanisms.
Thanks for this piece. I always learn something from your work. I do have a question. In part two you note that "those who substituted for the state in the NGO-ization wave of the last 35 years partially contributed to the weakening of the African state." Could you recommend some literature on that point? It makes intuitive sense, of course, that external actors assuming government responsibilities would allow governments to skate, but it's the opposite of what I've observed in the health sector. (Note: Health is absolutely not my area of expertise, but it is my wife's.) In country after country, global organization around the AIDS crisis, particularly PEPFAR, has strengthened government capacity rather than weakened it. I'm also a bit curious about the 35 year time frame. That corresponds with a wave of democratization, and I can't help but wonder if the disturbing implication is that democracy has undercut governance.
Wow. This is really fine, always good, this is even better. A point that kind of gets lost is the element of "investing in soft power" that Bermeo mentions as a purpose of aid. A point one has to ask is "soft power" with who? It is easy to delude oneself that if one does "good" aid defined by "cost effective" projects that benefit the poor this will lead to "soft power"--but that is beyond naive. In many ways making aid "better" at the way in which philanthropy defines it makes it worse for the political purposes of official aid.
Good read Ken. What’s your thoughts on Disaster Risk Finance (a necessary) being the foundation of international development aid and all other forms of development aid will be a contingent and on a minimal scale. That is to say that international aid will push towards funding only catastrophe relief and not day-to-day survival.
"Second, Sarah Bermeo wrote a short description of the purposes of foreign aid from the perspective of the U.S. government (and which applies to other donors as well). These include, fulfilling popular mandates in support of solidarity with foreigners; providing global public goods (like stopping the spread of infectious diseases); creating markets and strategic economic allies; investing in soft power; and increasing coercive leverage over others. This is an important piece to inoculate all who naively get carried away with the supposed benevolence of aid..."
There's a bit of a paradox here, because several of these purposes stop working if people don't view the aid as benevolent. If recipients don't consider the aid as benevolent, and donors learn this, it doesn't achieve as much solidarity with foreigners. It doesn't create allies or soft power. Recipients who think to themselves "you know, this aid isn't truly benevolent, it's really just a scheme for manipulating us" will not regard the donor country better, hence the donor country's soft power is not increased, hence the aid fails to achieve the goal.
As an American, I used to be really enthusiastic about the idea of helping people in Africa. When PEPFAR got cut, I looked over social media to see what the reactions where. Almost every reaction was one of the following: (a) "That's alright guys, we can stand on our own two feet, we don't need any of that Western aid" or even (b) "That Western aid was actually a secret conspiracy to ruin our countries. It is good that it is gone." It was quite difficult to find anyone expressing any gratitude for the millions of dollars the US has poured into Africa over the years, or even expressing sorrow that the money was no longer being provided. Overall, this experience caused my enthusiasm about helping Africa to drop dramatically. I realized that even if I was to work super hard and donate a ton of money to charities helping Africa, no one will ever feel any gratitude. People will either (a) not notice, (b) take it for granted, or (c) cynically assume I have some sort of ulterior motive. What's the point in working to help someone who can't even bother to say thanks?
I dont know how we help adjust structures in places like drc short of the slow boring work of supporting democracy, human rights and so on. In the meantime dont we save the most lives with the few dollars we have on emergency protein enhanced maize porridge for those starving in the handful of war torn and dysfunctional countries like eastern congo?
Engaging and thought-provoking as always! I wonder how you would fit in the ebbs and flows in enthusiasm for budget support. In the early 2000s budget support was seen in donor circles as the aid modality of the future for many of the reasons you discuss – places recipient govt in drivers seat, avoids parallel implementation structures etc. Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness was all about this. My impression was that the World Bank’s aim was to do as much of it as feasible (although less so for big infrastructure projects). Might be worth thinking more about why/how pendulum swung back. To some extent the ‘soft power’ proved problematic. Budget support flows tended to stop and start in ways that undermined sound budget management, whenever a recipient government did something politically unpalatable to donor country electorates (corruption, human rights etc.).
We are seeing the downstream effects of many of this in the Africa venture capital space. Some thoughts here: https://longtail.substack.com/p/narrative-lock-in
This is refreshing. Thanks for bringing those quotations to light also. Mkandawire and Ang are excellent