For possibly the first time ever, this year I watched all of the TV coverage of Comic Relief.
I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of some of the comedy, but more importantly I found myself moved by the coverage of funded programmes in the UK and in some of the poorest parts of the world.
I was clearly not the only one. Some £57 million was raised by the time coverage ended in the early hours of last Saturday, and the final totals are estimated to be higher still.
To some extent, this is a mere drop in the ocean in terms of the level of need. Larry Elliot, writing in today’s Guardian, quoted IMF sources as predicting that it could take as much as $140bn to protect the poorest countries from the current financial crisis.
However, in the context of a steady stream of examples of the impact of the credit crunch within the UK, this level of public support – and belief – in the power of aid to help those worse off is impressive.
For Larry Elliot, ‘moral and political pressure must be put on rich countries to keep their pledges’ – namely to increase, rather than decrease, aid in the context of a global tightening of belts.
But is the public right to put its faith in, and to bring pressure on its political leaders, to increase current aid flows? A new book called ‘Dead Aid’ by Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist, argues that foreign aid overall has in fact been detrimental to African development – and should stop.
Her argument focuses on two themes. The first is that, for African governments, aid (whether in the form of grants or loans) is seen as ‘easy money’. Without having to rely on taxation, they are removed from being held to account by their publics and as such there is little incentive for these governments (whether democratic or not) to enact development policies that really tackle poverty.
Secondly, her response to this is that aid should be cut, and African governments should instead raise money for development through financial markets, internationally or domestically.
She does not address the current financial crisis – but it both supports and undermines her proposed solution. Aid is being cut, and will be cut further, as richer countries are forced to prioritise significant levels of spending at home rather than abroad. But at the same time, the opportunity for African countries to raise money on financial markets has significantly dropped, as investors’ appetite for risk decreases. As today’s Guardian shows, this will have potentially disastrous effects on some of the poorest people across Africa.
But Moyo does not address a crucial issue. For her, ‘aid’ is seemingly uniform in its approach and impact. While there is some evidence that aid undermines governance, what we need is a better understanding of which forms of aid can strengthen or undermine governance in poor countries.
The solution, then, to criticisms of the impact of aid should be better aid, which can clearly demonstrate positive impacts, rather than an end to aid itself.
To date, donors have tended to focus on technocratic evaluations of the impact of aid – with complicated logframes and matrices for reporting and a focus on recording activities delivered and beneficiaries reached rather than actual impact and change.
We already have some pointers as to what may work better. A focus on impact and positive change needs to be less prescriptive and foster greater ownership at national and local levels. One big challenge for aid flows is that they often occur between governments, with little inclusion or opportunities for oversight by parliamentarians or publics. Supporting measures to improve the accountability of aid might therefore strengthen its impact on governance (though this will also require a step-change in the mindsets of many parliamentarians in these countries). Providing ceilings to large aid flows, so that they cannot come to be seen as ‘easy money’ might also help. And while conditions applied to aid have been highly controversial, the fact is that aid does have an impact on national politics, so donors should not shy away from exploring political conditionalities to build better governance.
What Comic Relief successfully revealed is that there is still public appetite and support for helping those who are genuinely in need. Those viewers who sent donations via text message received a message that said “We promise to do great work with your money”.
Governments who provide aid, and those that receive it, need to have the same ambition. And they will need to figure out just what ‘great work’ means, and how to achieve it, if they want to maintain public support.
Leni Wild is writing in a personal capacity