When does aid become harmful?

According to S. K. B. Asante in International Assistance and International Capitalism: Supportive or Counterproductive?, “Summing up the experience of African countries both at the national and at the regional levels it is no exaggeration to suggest that, on balance, foreign assistance, especially foreign capitalism, has been somewhat deleterious to African development.” Is this true? At what point does aid become harmful to the people receiving it?

In American society we are brought up with the idea that as Americans we are ‘the best’ and must spread our ‘best-ness’ around to everyone else. Although these ideas are vague and near immeasurable, we hold them up as if they are indisputable. From John Winthrop’s ‘City upon a Hill’ to Fareed Zakaria noting in The Post-American World that America is the only nation that issues report cards to every other country in the world every year, this idea is ingrained in our society. However, I am not here to write about American exceptionalism, I am here to talk about one of the things that it causes… humanitarian and developmental aid, specifically in Africa, and whether it helps or hurts the people receiving aid.

First, the good side of foreign development and aid. Aid can be given for many different reasons including natural disaster, to strengthen allies, to provide infrastructure needed to evacuate natural recourses, and commercial access. Of course, humanitarian ideals are also held and aid is given for that reason as well. Direct humanitarian aid, like sending doctors, food, and shelter to areas which are affected by war or natural disasters saves lives. There are many organizations that help with medical assistance, food, shelter, education, and a whole host of other problems in other countries. I probably don’t need to preach to you too much about how good humanitarian aid is. It saves lives! Over 44 billion dollars in 2008 was donated to Africa from other countries to help in developmental and humanitarian aid. That’s a lot of medical supplies, food, and tents, all of which are essential to people who have been affected by natural disaster or war.

Direct humanitarian aid does save lives, but developmental aid is harder to pin down. Developmental aid can become a political tool for developed countries to influence other countries. In the Cold War, for example, both sides used aid to garner allies and support them with no view of where the aid was going. James Shikwati, a Kenyan economist, says that developmental aid in Africa is harmful because many times it is distributed by politicians and can help prop-up corrupt governments that use the aid to manipulate the people they govern. Shikwati uses the example of food aid in Kenya, portions of which are sold on the black market at prices that undercut local farmers. Furthermore, Mark Brown, former head of the United Nations Development Program, said that food aid cost developing countries about $50 billion dollars a year in agricultural exports not exported. In places that corruption is high, aid money goes a long way to finance things it is not meant to finance. Monetary aid in Iraq for example is considered to be about 15 cents on each dollar donated. Also, foreign aid can make an impact in ways that they are not meant to. For instance, sending educational aid may help a government reallocate funds from their educational spending to their military spending, so the actual increase in spending goes to the military rather than education. So, developmental aid can be harmful to the people it attempts to aid.

Now we come back to our American exceptionalism and wonder, are we doing the right thing? At what point does our want to help people actually end up harming them. It should be noted that although the United States does come up as the highest donor on many lists, it does not come in even the top fifteen (out of the 22 measured) in the Commitment to Development Index, which measures factors other than money. So I would like to ask, what do you think?