Foreign Aid Keeps Sub-Saharan Africa At The Bottom
Foreign aid to Africa, and in particular to Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has not led to any significant progress in the effort to alleviate poverty in the region. Despite all the foreign assistance and its enormous natural resources, SSA is home to the largest portion of the world’s “Bottom Billion” and those in extreme poverty.
The evidence shows that foreign aid to SSA has ended up doing more harm than good because of poor leadership, endemic corruption and lack of sense of nationhood. Despite all the foreign assistance, more people in SSA live below the poverty line, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer and economic growth in the region is severely impeded.
The willingness of “kind souls” from outside Africa to keep helping Sub-Saharan Africans, sometimes at considerable risk to their safety is quite noble. However, there must be a rethinking of the fundamental premise and structure of foreign aid to SSA. The current model needs significant retooling.
There are three major self- propagating negative unintended consequences of open ended foreign aid to Sub-Saharan Africa.
First: The current model does not take into account the negative consequences of chronic dependency. Far too often, the focus is on giving as much as possible, and not enough attention is paid to incorporating mandatory features for weaning the recipients off the handouts.
As long as the trajectory of foreign aid keeps going north, the recipients are denied the opportunity and any reason to pause and think about the downside of chronic handouts.
No segment of the human race, sad to say, has proven more incapable of fending for itself without outside assistance than the “current edition” of Sub-Saharan Africans. Take away the foreign aid, and the citizens would plunge into sub-human existence, despite the region’s overwhelming advantage in nature’s gift of natural resources.
Second: The current foreign aid delivery model affirms, albeit unintentionally, the sad ingrained mindset of many Sub-Saharan Africans that “Blacks can’t do this or that; only Whites can do that”. In addition, by and large, foreign aid as presently delivered fuels the notion that the thought processes of non-Africans are superior to the thought processes of Africans. Sadly, this notion has no short supply of adherents in SSA.
Third: Open -ended, escalating foreign aid sends the wrong message to the next generation. When the children and young adults read on the road side bill boards and in nearly all their schools, clinics, and hospitals the following signs: “Donated by World Bank; Built with Funds from the World Health Organization”; Funded by a Grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation”, etc., the drive for self actualization is destroyed. Consciously and subconsciously, the children and young adults are incubating the eggs of a “can’t do” ethos.
What should be done to mitigate these negative unintended consequencies of foreign aid to SSA?
There are no easy answers and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. However, one critical issue that must be addressed is the endemic leadership failure in the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa. The big challenge facing the region is how to raise a different generation of leaders who would be selfless, altruistic and embrace the idea of justice and honest governance.
This is a huge task, given the deep rooted corruption and injustice in most of the nations in the region. But Sub-Saharan Africans have no choice. There must be major paradigm shifts in beliefs, desires and behavior from within these nations. The current path is unsustainable. Urgent change in leadership culture is required for the trajectory of foreign aid to be reversed so that it will point south and eventually fade out.
It is in the best interest of these nations to wean themselves off foreign aid. Yes, the process will not be painless, but freedom from dependency is not painless.
In order for the nations of Sub-Saharan Africa to exit “The Bottom Billion”, the new generation of leaders must commit to “Justice”, “Mercy, Goodness” and “Love” of their nations far beyond themselves.
Without these fundamental change from within these nations, not much will change in the region, no matter the size or amount of external benevolence.
