If you ever thought you were doing your fair share to help the starving poor in the world by giving money to a relief agency, here is an experienced relief worker’s insightful challenge to that thinking.
Africa Doesn’t Matter: How the West Has Failed the Poorest Continent and What We Can Do About It
Giles Bolton
Arcade Publishing, New York, Copyright 2007, 350 pages
Giles Bolton is a British-born relief worker and diplomat who has spent a good part of his professional life as an on-the-ground representative of several international relief agencies working in Africa. He has seen the good, the bad and the ugly up close, and knows whereof he speaks.
His book is not a self righteous tirade against developed countries not doing enough. Rather, it’s a clear expose of what are the real problems facing poor African nations, why billions of dollars in public and private aid over many decades has done so little to raise standards of living in Africa, and, importantly, what you and I as citizens of the developed west can do to make a real difference.
Surprisingly, his answer is not “The West must give more money.”
He develops his case from both personal experience and careful research. Drawing on economic data from World Bank and other sources, Bolton lays out the relief industry in easy to follow charts – where the money comes from, where it goes, how effective is it.
He sketches out the African historical context, from pre-colonial times, to the century-long period of western colonization, the wars of independence, and the current political and economic struggle to ascend from poverty.
To dramatize the predicament African nations face, he uses the metaphor of a hypothetical African country – the Republic of Uzima — to which the reader has just been elected president, and follows him (you) through the first week in office and the initial briefings by various cabinet ministers. Bolton gives us a terrific appreciation for the difficulties facing even the most capable and honest leaders of these emerging nations.
To see life from the point of view of the intended recipient — Bolton introduces us to real families he knows in different countries — Marie in Congo and Lucas in Kenya, and follows them through a day in the life of a poor person in Africa.
The combined effect is to impart a clear view of where western aid has failed to achieve its desired ends in Africa.
Some key insights from the book:
- The aid industry, like others, is subject to economies of scale, as well as to the problem of large organizations — bureaucracy. Small relief agencies spend too much of their receipts on fund-raising and administration, rather than delivering aid to the needy. Large relief agencies have trouble executing on the ground, and are often subverted by corruption at the local level. Many agencies operate in the same areas but do not coordinate their efforts.
- Being dependent on the good will of donors, few relief agencies give objective reports on the effectiveness of the programs they run. Donors are more concerned with giving rather than with the effectiveness of their gifts. To many, it seems uncharitable to ask what good a program is doing. The dual effects invariably lead to lack of accountability.
- Aid must come in a form that works for the recipients rather than a program designed by well intentioned program developers thousands of miles away.
- Much of public aid is tied to developed nations own exports — grain & medical supplies, for example — and to paying the salaries and benefits of the administrators of the program. Bolton estimates that over 80% of public aid is “diverted” to recipients in the western developed countries.
- The majority of sub-Saharan Africa survives on subsistence agriculture. Bolton introduces us to Jean Marie who has a small plot of land, which makes her more fortunate than most her neighbors. But her living conditions are so fragile that the slightest bump to her living situation can knock her family into starvation, to seeking relief and becoming refugees.
- Disasters tend to attract large scale emergency relief, but then there is little follow-on to alleviate the conditions that led to the disaster in the first place. Living on the precipice of starvation continues to be the norm.
- The core problem is unemployment. Africans spend many hours walking to town to find work, not to go to work. When they find work, it is often temporary, and low paying. It is the lack of industry (not unwillingness to work) that is killing much of Sub-Saharan Africa.
- Many African nations’ economies depend on a few commodities – cotton, cocoa, coffee, tea. A bad season can wreak havoc with local economies.
- The great failing of the West is that its trade policies work to limit the full development of Africa’s comparative advantage — agriculture. World Trade Organization is largely concerned with fair trade of manufactured goods. Agricultural commodities are not addressed. Europe and the USA both subsidize their agriculture heavily. The result is they have dumped agricultural products on African markets, pushing out local farmers, and their policies limit African export sale of processed agricultural goods, reserving the higher value-adding processing for US and European companies.
The prescription Bolton calls for (after a plea that western nations live up to their pledges for giving aid) is primarily a call for free and fair trade with Africa. Being a realist, he understands that trade policy is a matter of special interests and lobbying. His call then is to individuals – you and me – to change our buying habits to favor African processed goods, as well as bring political pressure to bear on our elected leaders to reduce harmful farm subsidies.
“Poverty,” Gandhi is quoted as saying, “is the worst form of violence.”
If you are new to this subject, Giles Bolton’s book is a balanced, candid and reasonably dispassionate look at the aid industry as it works today in Africa. If the book has any shortcoming, it’s that the author doesn’t address the difference between relief agencies, most of which tend to not work, and development agencies, some of which appear to work admirably. He also basically gives the OPEC Arab nations a “pass” on their global responsibilities to help developing countries. Perhaps the author simply did not intend to cover this subject. But as each of the western countries is compared on public and private giving programs, the inquiring mind naturally tends to wonder how the extravagantly rich Gulf states compare.
That said, it’s well worth the read, and a great challenge to those who do give, to review their giving in light of what works and what doesn’t.
