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Snowplows for Tropical Guinea

How We Can Learn from Failed Development Aid in Africa

By Bartholomäus Grill

The record of 50 years of development aid is disastrous. Billions have been poured into recipient countries without lasting progress. For many Africans, conditions are worse than ever. More money and big new initiatives are not the answer. Instead, donor countries need to analyze their failures and work on creative solutions.

Northeastern Kenya was devastated. The country was hit by famine, drought, and death. But then white experts arrived to end the biblical plagues. They came from Norway and they had a brilliant idea: They would give the suffering nomads on Lake Turkana a fish factory to alleviate the impact of the periodic natural catastrophes and to create jobs. So they built their factory and only noticed afterward that the livestock-rearing Turkana scorned fish as well as wage labor; that the energy needed to deep-freeze the tilapia filets in the semi-desert region cost several times their market value; and that they had not taken into account the millions of dollars required to build new streets to get the merchandise to market. More experts came from Norway to evaluate these mistakes, and they exclaimed: "Oh my God, how could we have been so stupid!"

Altruism is as old as its antithesis, exploitation. From the comical, coin-eating "Jolly Negroes" set up in churches in the colonial period, to the Holstein cows that German president Heinrich Lübke wanted to send to Pakistan, to Microsoft’s vision of a laptop in every hut -- all these good deeds and intentions are based on the philosophy of the kindhearted jungle doctor Albert Schweitzer. This philosophy also motivates Third World advocates and government aid experts: We must in some way make up for everything the "white man" has done to the lost and damned of this world. Too bad "reason" is so rarely part of the equation.

The 1970s Norwegian fish mission on Lake Turkana is just an anecdote today. It elicits the same chuckles as the snowplows the Soviet Union sent to its tropical "brother nation" of Guinea. When the average person demands that aid be stopped, this anecdote and similar tales get told, and now even serious publications are joining the chorus. What has it accomplished, the trillion or so dollars of aid that the developed world has transferred to underdeveloped countries since the 1950s? Why have the poor grown poorer despite the handouts? What business do we have helping a successful Asian tiger like Thailand? Why are alms going to the Angolans, who are swimming in oil? The unanimous opinion: tax money should no longer be squandered on nonsense like this. Even scholars like William Easterly, who once worked for the World Bank and is currently at New York University, have recommended reducing development aid and overhauling its structures. The Kenyan economist James Shikwati suggests striking it completely. He calls it "mis-development aid" and argues that it only benefits a corrupt elite.

At the same time, other groups are calling for more and better aid. They include not only development agencies, churches, and humanitarian organizations, but also naïve do-gooders. They want countries to finally live up to their promise of committing 0.7 percent of their GNPs to the welfare of the South. Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, German minister of economic cooperation and development, is at least attempting to reach the interim mark of 0.51 percent agreed on in the German government’s coalition contract. She rightly points out that total North-South transfers over the last 50 years barely amount to annual global outlays for arms. On an international scale, what we are talking about is peanuts.

But no one can deny that a lot has gone wrong from the start, or that little has been learned since Brigitte Erler returned from Bangladesh in 1985, quit her job at the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation, and presented her j’accuse in the book Tödliche Hilfe (Deadly Aid). Billions have continued to flow aimlessly to the South -- after all, we need to help in some way. What was once called "knitting socks for Negro children" in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks has become "plucking guitars for Africans" at Bob Geldof’s pop concerts. The do-gooders want to create a just and dignified world, but for centuries the results have remained the same: dashed hopes, untold flops, and a herd of white elephants idly dotting the landscape.

But now -- or so we are told -- the United Nations’ Millennium Project will change everything. The once-in-a-millennium development offensive, led by star economist Jeffrey Sachs, intends to increase aid threefold and to halve extreme poverty by 2015. It is surely an ambitious, respectable program with lots of good ideas, but it, too, builds on an outmoded "donor" orthodoxy: here the noble Samaritans, there the perpetual beggars, between them a plan to shower the poor with the goods of an affluent society, thus bringing salvation from outside. "A lot helps a lot" is the slogan, but how is this Marshall Plan going to succeed when its underlying strategy has failed for the last 50 years?

Development aid was invented to help the young states of the South during decolonization in the late 1950s. The seemingly philanthropic motives concealed the strategic calculations of the Cold War. In the struggle over geopolitical hegemony, the two large power blocs -- the West and the East -- were eager to impose their capitalist and socialist modernization models on the Third World. With generous subsidies and non-cash benefits such as tanks and rockets, they not only bought the ideological loyalty of elite groups in the South but also promoted their own export industry on the side. The satraps in Africa, Asia, and Latin America gratefully bellied up to the buffet, but while foreign aid secured their power, it also made them into children. After all, they were now on the "drip" -- dependent on infusions.