Foreign aid has not only failed to spur the growth and development in Africa that it initially promised, but it is causing a deterioration of the relationship between governments and their citizens, write Philip Akrofi Atitianti and Samuel Kofi Asiamah.
At the superficial level, providing foreign aid to poor economies should be a reliable way to boost development and improve the living standards of local people. After all, foreign aid can be used to fund the construction of schools, hospitals, and roads that empower citizens economically and socially. Unfortunately, this has not been the case. Sub-Saharan Africa has received significant foreign aid over the years, yet the region remains the poorest in the world.
The prevailing poor living standards in sub-Saharan Africa show that foreign aid hasn’t effectively met its objectives of stimulating growth and development. Researchers have attributed this failure to an array of causes and proposed many different approaches to improve the effectiveness of aid. But critics of foreign aid are concerned not just about aid’s ineffectiveness but also its adverse unintended consequences.
The state-citizen relationship, a critical ingredient for development, is one of the areas where the unintended impact of foreign aid is being felt. Mitigating both the inefficiencies and adverse unintended consequences of aid requires a thorough understanding of how foreign aid can harm the relationship between the state and its citizens.
Foreign aid and state-citizen relations
Governments are primarily responsible for providing public goods and services, and spearheading initiatives to propel growth and development. Any government that successfully provides such amenities is more likely to be judged as competent by its citizens. Contrarily, when these expectations are unmet citizens express their displeasure through, amongst other things, protests, and voting against the government in elections.
Governments fund projects using revenue from taxes and debt. Foreign aid supplements this revenue in the form of loans and grants. Aid can be offered as budget support – a transfer of cash to the recipient country – or project assistance – implementing projects in the recipient country. Since most governments in sub-Saharan Africa find it challenging to self-fund adequate infrastructure projects, foreign aid has become a major source of funding for these programmes.
To obtain recognition for their benevolence, foreign aid donors often openly disclose their aid transfers and brand the projects they fund with flags and logos. But this has implications for how citizens evaluate their own government’s performance.
The relationship between the state and its citizens is a form of ‘fiscal contract’ in which the state, in exchange for the public goods and services it provides, receives a compliant attitude from citizens to tax payments and other civic responsibilities. When the government is not the primary provider of public goods and services, this contract can be broken, and citizens may feel inclined to withhold their side of the bargain. The continuous inflow of aid means actors other than the local government increasingly become the primary providers of what citizens expect from their governments, and this influences how people view the state.
The inflow of aid into Africa has resulted in poor perceptions of governance among the citizenry. People residing close to aid projects rate their governments as poor managers of the economy, express lower levels of trust in the government and consequently vote against the government in elections. These citizens also perceive government officials as involved in corrupt activities, which plays into perceptions of donors using aid to advance their own interests. Since some foreign aid comes with specified conditions, recipient governments are often compelled to prioritise the conditions of the aid over national needs.
These practices help generate negative perceptions about foreign aid and governance, leading to a breakdown of the relationship between governments and their citizens. Consequently, not only is the effectiveness of foreign aid in doubt, but it may be doing more harm than good.
The way forward
The deterioration of the state-citizen relationship as a result of foreign aid is detrimental to development and needs to be mitigated. The poverty levels in sub-Saharan Africa suggest that foreign aid hasn’t been effective as intended in stimulating economic growth. If these same aid flows are contributing to the collapse of trust between the state and its citizens, then the use of foreign aid as a development tool needs to be comprehensively reevaluated.
This article is based on the authors’ article: Aid and Governance: Impact of Chinese Aid on the Evaluation of Government Performance in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Photo credit: DFID used with permission CC BY 2.0
The exact same observation was made by Professor Sophal Ear of Cambodia. I too witnessed well intentioned but over-generous Foreign Aid “gifts” that undermined projects with more sustainable outcomes. Hand-outs of bags of rice donated by a UN agency via international NGOs meant that some farmers gave up on the hard labour of planting crops and saving seeds, so undermining the co-operative-based community Rice Banks we’d carefully nurtured. In another area, our integrated community development self-help groups, working on new livelihoods and eradicating malaria, lost memberships and commitment, when a new NGO entered the scene giving out generous per diems and grants. Little wonder our poor indigenous people gave up on their self-savings and step-by-step progress for instant benefits. Needless to say that new NGO came and went, but was deemed successful, in its donor-funded project, despite nothing to show for it within months of their exit.
Excellent observation regarding the “state-citizen relations” and the roles of aid therein. It is however important to note that the influx of aid into Sub-Saharan Africa is not a major factor in the broken relationship between Sub-Saharan African states and their citizens. The inability of the leaders to properly harness the abundant resources in their countries gave rise to dependence on aid in the first place. A country can only have the right managers of the economy when square pegs are not fitted into round holes, and competence is not sacrificed for nepotism. So, it all boils down to corruption. The citizens know that their leaders are corrupt and do not care about their wellbeing, that is the major factor in the breakdown of the social contract.
Aid will function in systems with solid institutions void of corrupt practices and where the principles of checks and balances are fully operational. Leaders would work for the people when the institutions are bigger than the leaders and not the other way round. With strong institutions, elected officials would negotiate for aids without conceding so much to the donors and to the detriment of their citizenry as it is often the case, because the institutions will stand to check them if they do not.
Donors do not mind if their aids do not work, provided they receive concessions from the recipients in several bilateral negotiations. The only way forward remains active political participation by the large youth population in Sub-Saharan Africa. The youths would have to demand more from their leaders engage with them frequently and not just during election years. Protest wrong policies that would not help the economy, recall underperforming representatives at the national and regional assemblies, and make efforts to run for political offices themselves where they can make a difference. The biggest sufferers of the underdevelopment in Sub-Saharan Africa are the citizens, they must be at the forefront of the solution.
How aid affects the state-citizen relationship was raised as long ago as 1994, perhaps for the first time, in my book at The Poverty of Nations, The Aid Dilemma at the Heart of Africa which suggested that aid had given Africans representation without taxation. p48 ff. However the aid community has strong incentives to avoid this conclusion which it resists.