Foreign Aid and the Devastation of the Global South
Divya Patel
Foreign aid today is the functional equivalent of remedying a gunshot wound with a bandaid. It is an ineffective, often conditional, and somewhat superficial temporary fix that is blind to the root problems facing “developing” nations. Immediate foreign aid fails to address the structural problems and inequities underlying poverty in the Global South, many of which are fueled by neoliberal efforts by the Western world to preserve their own power and global standing. It is also seen through a paternalistic foreign lens that reinforces the “White-Savior Industrial Complex,” one that assumes that first world countries know what’s best for the third world, yet doesn’t understand the complexities surrounding local issues.
A heated literary exchange on HuffPost between economists Dr. Dambisa Moyo and Jeffrey Sachs proves that there is, in fact, a wrong way to aid. Moyo’s ideal approach can be summarized in one phrase, “Africans need jobs, not sympathy.” She claims that the foreign aid provided today by Western countries creates a system of dependency and stifles local production and growth. An example she uses to justify this is mosquito nets, an opinion that Sachs has judged her harshly for. Although providing 10 million dollars worth of anti-malarial bed nets may be beneficial in a short-term manner for Africans, Moyo explains, it prevents local businesses from producing their own, therefore harming the local economy. The same can be said for other materials and assets, such as agricultural production and healthcare kits. Her point proves that surface-level foreign aid does nothing to truly advance the economies of African nations, as it provides resources that they could produce themselves with proper economic development.
Sachs takes offense to this claim, simultaneously calling Moyo “confused” and “unmoved by mass suffering,” despite the obvious truths to her arguments. He defends the current state of foreign aid by claiming that economic and health-related conditions in Africa have significantly improved in recent decades, citing increases in literacy (27% in 1970 to 62% in 2007) and deductions in child mortality (229 per 1,000 births in 1970 to 146 per 1,000 births in 2007). He also leans heavily on noting the improvements made in controlling diseases such as AIDS and malaria. Despite these positive changes made since the mid to late 1900s, especially in regards to infectious disease, Sachs forgets that aid is not doing nearly enough. Poverty still plagues the global South, especially in Africa, where 433 million Africans are living in extreme poverty, a significant jump from 284 million in 1990. Slight improvements do not amount to equity and sufficient relief.
Sachs also fails to acknowledge the historical roots behind poverty and suffering in the global South, the fact that many improvements in social and economic conditions are because of internal efforts by many countries, and the often disastrous “aid” efforts that have been used to keep the world’s poor in their current state. Sachs routinely declares “Aid did not kill Africa '' in his response to Dr. Moyo. Although that may be true to an extent, what did kill Africa is centuries of enslavement, colonization, and neo-imperialism imposed on the continent by the Western world. Nations such as Belgium, France, and Great Britain greedily stripped countries in the global South such as India and the Congo of their resources and wealth; at the same time, they dehumanized and brutalized their native populations. Mass colonization efforts such as the Scramble for Africa also caused political and economic stability, and the effects have lasted till this day. The Western world often blames failed aid efforts on corrupt governments and unstable political leadership, and although there are many more complexities to failed aid than this answer, first world countries are partially to blame for this instability. The global North has no right to say that their aid efforts are sufficient considering that they are the cause of much of this mass suffering. In reference to the gunshot wound analogy, the Western world fired the bullet.