Standing on Your Own Two Feet

Development aid to Africa is once again beleaguered by assailants. It's nothing new: Graham Hancock started it about 20 years ago with the still-popular Lords of Poverty. But the number of recent attacks is rising rapidly. It has become fashionable to bad-mouth the alphabet soup of the development world. There are a host of recently-published accounts, including Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid and William Easterly's White Man's Burden, which make broadly the same point: development aid has failed.

Of course, the aid industry retains its apologists, most of whom owe their livelihoods to it. They say things like “almost any result can be obtained when aid is lumped together”, or “We’ve learned from the successes and failures of the past: our new programmes have clearly defined outcomes…..” Well, maybe, but as Mark Twain observed: history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, so please excuse my skepticism.

The simple fact is that if you speak to anyone who has been involved in development assistance in Africa for any significant length of time they will reluctantly admit that it has been neither effective nor efficient. Several hundreds of billions of Dollars have been spent without achieving several hundreds of billions' worth of value. True, there are beacons of success, but they are few and far between and generally owe their success to the actions and determination of remarkable individuals

My principal objection to the aid business relates to the dependency culture it creates. This culture manifests itself in all sorts of ways, but something much ignored by aid advocates is its impact on the labour market. In my experience, with the possible exception of the banking and legal sectors, aid organizations in Africa tend to be the highest payers, offering the best terms and conditions of employment. My argument is that this discourages the brightest and most dynamic individuals from going into private enterprise and therefore deprives the private sector of the kind of talent it needs in order to grow. And, if we are being honest, it is hard to deny that the private sector is the engine of economic development and wealth creation. It's hardly a new idea: Schumpeter, in his Theory of Economic Development, published just under 100 years ago, postulated the thesis that development is propelled, not by Government intervention, but by the actions of entrepreneurs. If writing today, it is hard to imagine that Schumpeter would have been a supporter of international aid. It is far more likely that he would have subscribed to Dambisa Moyo's conclusion that the growth of the private sector (albeit with effective regulation) and free enterprise represents the best prospect for sustainable development.

In saying this, I recognise that to dismantle international development aid overnight (as Ms Moyo seems to suggest) would have disastrous short term consequences in health, education and many other social goods, but there has to be a policy of withdrawal and transition if we are going to find a way of breaking the current dependency culture.

And now to explain the picture. It's a snap of my daughter Roxanne taken about four weeks ago, just before she took her first few faltering steps. Just as for my two older sons, I have witnessed the immense effort, the colossal motivation and the tireless determination that children have to stand on their own two feet: unsupported by their parents. And it is universally true – it doesn’t matter what culture, what race, what socio-economic background. Human beings everywhere want to stand on their own two feet.

In the words of Abraham Lincoln, "You cannot permanently do more for people than they are capable of doing for themselves". It's time for Western Governments to admit failure, abandon aid in its present form and support private sector development by (among other things) the removal of unfair trade barriers and investment in improved infrastructure. Africa is perfectly able to stand on its own two feet. Let it do so.