In “Our Turn to Eat,” Michaela Wrong writes about Kenya:
Kenya’s foreign partners failed to grasp that a system of rule based on the ‘Our Turn to Eat’ principle was explicitly designed to prevent the trickle-down upon which they counted for progress. The better Kenya’s economy fared, the more unstable the country actually became, because public awareness of inequality – sociologists call the phenomenon ‘invidious comparison’ – deepened a notch.
It was a poor bet for the donors to make, for nothing sabotages development programmes more dramatically than violence. Decades of work on school-building, AIDS prevention and gender-awareness-raising are wiped out in a moment when the first shamba goes up in flames and its terrified family hits the road. Convinced they grasped the big picture, the donors somehow managed to miss the approaching near-collapse of an African state.
And:
As for the Western tendency to turn a blind eye to blatant graft and routine human rights abuse in the eagerness to save ‘the poorest of the poor’, it is a feature of donor relations across the continent.
And finally:
If they only set foot on the continent, idealistic Westerners would be astonished to hear how often, and how fiercely, politically engaged Africans…call for aid to be cut, conditionalities sharpened. Kenyan journalist Kwanchetsi Makokha is not alone in detecting an incipient racism, rather than altruism, in our lack of discrimination. ‘Fundamentally the West doesn’t care enough about Africa to pay too much attention to how its money is spent. It wants to be seen to do the right thing, and that’s as far as the interest goes.’
While I haven’t had the chance to read the whole book yet, I’ve read a few chapters through one of my classes. I find her quotes fascinating – that donors and aid agencies are so focused on helping the poor that sometimes they forget to think about the broader context in which their work is operating. It seems to me that donors are generally less willing to support more “abstract” projects such as human rights monitoring or anti-corruption initiatives, because they want “direct” results and want their money to directly go to the poor through education, healthcare, microfinance loans, etc. But being aware of this broader context is, as Wrong indicates, absolutely vital if genuine change is going to occur. The ultimate goal of NGOs should not be simply to provide aid but also to contribute to the creation of a capable, efficient state that itself can provide these public goods to its people.
This definitely requires a more holistic outlook, taking into account human rights violations and corruption as part of the context in which people live. There is a problem today where “human rights” and “development” are looked at as two separate areas. But they really need to be integrated in order to generate the best outcomes.
Also, I find it interesting that she (like Dambisa Moyo) is pushing for increased governance conditionalities, and for aid to be cut until governments change their corrupt practices. I definitely see the value in governance conditionalities but would shy away from advocating a complete cut in aid. I like Kristof’s balanced take on the issue, where he emphasizes that aid has its shortcomings but has also seen some successes. We need to find a middle ground between aid and trade (or some way to include both), and perhaps one way to do so is to begin with governance conditionalities.
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