External Aid to Africa Flashcards
Context of Africa and Aid?
International aid is perceived as an ethical way to alleviate poverty in the global South
Africa is the most aid dependent continent – In 2018, 36.6% of official aid went to Africa;
Indebtedness linked to increased poverty in the 1990s - 32 of 53 African countries identified as severely indebted;
Source: World Bank Development Reports
Indebtedness used to justify neo-liberal economic reform – aid linked to conditionalities
Who are the Aid Donors?
Aid has its geopolitics – capitalist countries/or strategically located countries in Africa got more aid from the West –Ethiopia, Nigeria, Egypt. – ‘Soft Power’
Multilateral – from IMF, World Bank etc.
Bilateral – from government to government – national interest
International Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) – resources from western publics and increasingly government – some alignment with funding govt. policies
Critiques of NGOs?
INGOs no longer seen as exclusively non-state actors
INGOs seen as undermining local civil society
‘White saviour complex’
Local NGOs vulnerable to state oppression
State- sponsored NGOs
What shifts are taking place in the AID sector?
New actors from Global South becoming prominent donors of Aid. Aid architecture is shifting – new geopolitics/geoeconomics of aid emerging with non-DAC donors – aid as soft power.
Aid becoming increasingly incorporated in trade and neoliberal doctrines of development. Encouraging and supporting private-sector investors in Africa. Aid to make African economies open to FDI.
What is ‘developmentality’?
New aid architecture of development partners – in response to critique of imbalance of power in top-down approaches; the attempt to revamp asymmetrical power relations between donors and recipients produced what Lie coined ‘developmentality’ (after Foucault’s governmentality) to mean ‘a subtle mode of power’ (Lie 2015).
Governing international aid recipients – neoliberal logic that requires aid recipients to be free, self-managing and self-enterprising actors – unconscious self-governance within the rules laid out by the donors, who govern from a distance.
One should, however, refrain from seeing developmentality as a hegemonic, totalising power. There is room for strategic action, manipulating practices and resistance. Those with in the government responsible for devising the PRSP document know what to write in order to have it accepted, which gives them a certain leverage and leeway, as does also knowing that the strategy document is merely a document and not practice (Lie 2015).
