thoughts on “innovating away from aid”
February 16, 2010
Some background… this started because of a lengthy comment i made to a NPR piece on aid to Haiti:
This is a really specific example, and definitely an issue on which i feel pretty conflicted. I know a lot of folks who are doing good work in long term positions in other countries, or through projects like City Year. There is also this crazy risk of cultural/social imperialism that worries me, the sort of coming in and doing something regardless of local practices (which may be better geared towards success in the given community).
I used to meet folks doing outreach work during my time living in China, and I even did some outreach work in China… and there was always this sort of problem nagging in my head. While some projects may have more of a pushy cultural aspect than others, I think my real misgiving on doing intense outreach work is that the value and “goodness” of the action is really determined on a case by case basis. I would rather assume good.
Unfortunately, the likelihood of best intentions accompanied by terrible action is more common in situations where speed probably overrules quality and close evaluation, and that’s going to be most prevalent in crisis relief.
This led me to listen to Dambisa Moyo talk on Innovating Away from Aid. She’s a Zambian economist, and if you don’t remember, she was on Colbert in April 2009.
It’s important to go back to this key idea that you don’t want whoever it is to be perpetually dependent on aid. I think in many situations around the world this has turned into some sort of bizarre post-colonial situation where helping only helps to keep people down.
Government involvement is also key, meaning the government of the place involved themselves. You can have amazingly talented and motivated individuals and citizens, but without government involvement things are not going to stick, nor are they going to be widespread.
Aid has contributed to the disfunction of governments. “Aid allows the government to abdicate their responsibilities.” This points out to the need to help build systems that work rather than provide crutches that allow a system to stay broken.
Dambisa Moyo is talking about Africa when she makes these three points, but I look at places like Indonesia, Burma, , Afghanistan, Russia, Haiti, Cuba, Iran, and Columbia, and these same problems abound. Even look at “aid” given in communities in the United States.
One of my favorite comments she makes, and Colbert poked at this back in April, is how unacceptable it is that there is so much celebrity involvement alongside a lack of government involvement. Honestly, the first people that come to mind in speaking about the problems in Africa are… Nelson Mandela, followed (in my mind) by a string of Hollywood faces.
What is the role of celebrity? Are there good examples floating around out there? George Clooney has family in politics, but he doesn’t go around trying to be some sort of spokesperson, though he’s a financial supporter to be sure.
Clooney points to a deeply personal example of Hollywood backlash: His father, former television anchorman and game show host Nick Clooney, lost his congressional race in Kentucky in 2004 after his opponent blasted him for having “Hollywood values.”
“It became an issue of Hollywood versus the heartland,” said Clooney, who opted not to publicly campaign for his father. “I believed I could only do him more harm.” (Daunt, LA Times)
Clooney has still been a very vocal and visible person in issues like Darfur, and I’m not saying that celebrities should totally stay out of anything political… it’s just a matter of trying to put things in the context of an organization, of convincing the media to treat issues seriously, and trying to encompass those who are in the power structure to take a role. More recently, Morgan Freeman also comes to mind as someone using celebrity in a way that *uses* art to portray issues to a wider audience in a sense that (hopefully) includes people in the process and gets people engaged.
Moyo takes it further to his on a truly disturbing flaw in representation aided by celebrity culture: the whole PR approach is negative. We always focus on war, disease, poverty, and hunger. She notes that there are more poor Chinese people on earth than poor Africans and more poor Indian people on earth than poor Africans.
I personally work a lot on China issues and I NEVER thought to make this comparison. Even in China they spend a lot of time lamenting the cause of poor Africans. Why is the picture of Africa one of destitution and despair? Aside from pictures of vast savannahs, deserts, and amazing megafauna, the pictures i most closely associate with the are ones of destitution or devastation.
Africa isn’t alone in this sort of PR black hole. Back in 2001 before my mother came to visit me in China this was *her* impression of where i lived. I remember her surprise at just how nice Hefei was as a city, and how people were generally better dressed than average Americans, even if all they were doing was sweeping the floor or changing tires.
Most basic reason aid doesn’t work: the money/resources are stolen. Corruption seeps into this issue. The Corruption Perceptions Index consistently ranks African countries at the bottom of the heap. Moyo lists several other reasons that aid doesn’t work, and essentially it leads to the lack of public goods, and an especial vulnerability as public goods are primarily funded by aid. This means that government spends its effort trying to curry the favor of donors rather than taking care of the citizens of the country.
Gee, this sounds like the same problem some folks are complaining about where *companies* have more power than the people. As an example, think about the Supreme Court ruling in Jan 2010 about corporate campaign financing, or you can listen to Lawrence Lessig give his thoughts on the matter. Give a quick scan to the commentary and you can get a feel over how conflicted this issue is in the US alone.
Flowing from this lack of government interest in the people and the public, it is incredibly difficult to do business in Africa. Travel, agreements, and currency exchange even between neighbors is extremely difficult to the point where people are going to go somewhere else where it’s easier to do business. In a continent full of young people it may be easy to see why people go from lack of employment to intense civil unrest and chaos. Moyo also looks at this as an inverse Boston Tea Party where there’s no taxation and thus, no representation.
On the hopeful side, places that are putting a dent in poverty are seen as potential models for improvement. China and India, while full of more people in poverty, have also managed to move more people *out* of poverty. There are a whole host of financing projects and business interaction that happens in those places, which lies in stark contrast to flow of aid to governments regardless of results in a manner that pools at one specific point (often the state level).
The saddest implication Moyo points out is this… the only reason these aid projects exist where money is essentially thrown into a black hole, regardless of results: people don’t actually believe Africa can develop. It’s kinda like imperialism all over again from a different angle.
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