Well, this is going to be an unpopular opinion I'm sure, but a lot of Sub-Saharan African countries seem to be shuffling Health and Human Services off to Western countries to handle, while they use economic aid for more "corrupt" purposes.
On the one hand it is always good to help people in need (especially children), but on the other hand, since it is just "given help" and not infrastructure development -- it tends to just kick the can down the road a little further.
Worse, sometimes aid even helps to stimulate corruption and economic imbalance that keeps many of those countries trapped in a borderline desperate cycle.
Here is an older, but still relevant, Wall Street Journal article that discusses the predicament from an economic standpoint[1].
Development aid also undermines democracy in developing countries because the elites focus on pleasing foreign donor organisations, rather than being accountable to their own population.
There is also a tendency of aid to destroy local economic structure, as the local producers can often not compete on price with free aid.
If you look at countries that managed to develop (e.g. South Korea or China in recent years), then they all did it without substantial involvement of foreign aid.
It is interesting to reflect on why development aid is so popular in the developed countries despite its obvious failures. Here are some reasons.
- Development organisations serve as levers of soft power. (If you
give us XYZ, we'll fund your railway/sewage treatment plant/school).
- On-the-ground workers of development organisations are convenient
sources of information and can often be used to supply false IDs for
spies, military operatives and the like.
- Multi-national companies regularly support development aid, because it's
good and cheap PR.
- Aid organisations are lucrative sources of income for their senior
staff in the developed world, and they well-oiled PR machines to
keep the funds flowing, and mute criticisms.
> Development aid also undermines democracy in developing countries because the elites focus on pleasing foreign donor organisations, rather than being accountable to their own population.
Of course, it can be good to undermine democracy, when the majority of the population support e.g. female genital mutilation or burning witches.
I'm wondering that myself. If we can't find a reliable place within the continent of Africa to produce this anti-venom then something is seriously wrong.
