The end of ‘aid’
The heyday is over. We can’t just cry about it.
L. Muthoni Wanyeki
International “aid” for Africa is shrinking – hastened this year by chaos and renewed insularity in the United States. Africa’s trade with the world is shrinking too. For heavily indebted countries, a perfect storm has made landfall.
At home, governments drain and oppress rather than support their residents. With social contracts in tatters, talk of seeing off the storm through more taxation is a farce.
The path out begins with a pivot in leadership.
African leaders must abandon domestic contempt and international supplication to build a progressive, ethical, coherent, and communal politic that’s loved at home and respected abroad. Only then can they constructively engage an erratic world and repair (or create) social contracts at home. In this new series, Kenyan political scientist L. Muthoni Wanyeki elaborates on the depth of our crises. Drawing from black progressive traditions, she charts the first steps away from imminent ruin – ours and the world’s.
Towards the end of July, two related stories broke about Kenya and Nigeria: a “starvation alert” in Kakuma refugee camp (home to 300,000 people) and a warning that the 1.4-million internally displaced people in Borno State would be pushed into the arms of Boko Haram. The BBC journalist responsible for both stories linked them to the end of US government funding for food rations and cash transfers, respectively.
The stories – which many other international and African media picked up – carried a clear subtext: the demise of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is a catastrophe for development.
Soon after retaking office, US President Donald Trump closed the agency and rolled up its remains into the State Department. Elon Musk, who at the time was Trump’s sidekick in the chaotic reorganisation of the US federal government, labelled the agency a “viper’s nest of radical left Marxists who hate America”. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said all “aid” was being reviewed for consistency with Trump’s “America First” agenda. Trump said the US would no longer “blindly dole out money with no return to the American people”.
Cynics would argue US “aid” has always been about “America First”. Grants were often tied to US “implementing partners” and food “aid” subsidised US farmers.
The new nakedly transactional approach in the US – placing “aid” in the State Department to explicitly link it with foreign policy – is not unprecedented. By 2013, almost half of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) donor countries had merged their aid and foreign affairs offices. They include Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, and, most recently, the United Kingdom.
With these mergers, “aid” shrank. In 2024, funds from these countries to “sub-Saharan” Africa declined 28%. Only Norway, Luxembourg, Sweden, and Denmark met the United Nations target: giving 0.7% of their national budget – a benchmark long derided as “supply driven”. The US never reached that target: in 2024, it gave 0.22% of its budget. However, its total contribution of $63.3-billion made the US the largest donor by volume.
China, which is not a member of the OECD, blurs distinctions between grants, loans, and investments, which makes comparisons tricky. Still, the China Global Development Dashboard shows its global development finance fell from a peak of $125-billion in 2016 to $42-billion in 2021. In Africa, that figure dropped from $36-billion in 2016 to $7-billion in 2021. The China Africa Research Initiative says Chinese lending to Africa dropped to less than $5-billion in 2023 and totalled $3.4-billion in 2024.
In short, the heyday of “aid” is over. Talk of “aid effectiveness” can rest in peace. The only surviving aid buzzword is “3D”: aligning development with the giver’s diplomatic and defence priorities.
The party is over too for the UN. By May, the UN had received only $1.8-billion of its $3.7-billion budget. The US – its largest debtor – was $1.5-billion in arrears, followed by China at $597-million. Its separate peacekeeping budget was in similar dire straits. The arrears are not going to be settled – this US administration is as vitriolic about the UN as it was about its own “aid” agency. By September when Trump gave his chastising speech at the UN General Assembly, US arrears had reportedly ballooned to $3-billion. The UN now plans to cut staff up to 20%, shrink budgets, and merge agencies.
The UN cuts are visible on the ground. Sudan received only 13% of the $4.2-billion the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs had called for. From Kenya’s Kakuma camp to Niger, Libya, and beyond, refugees are starving and protesting. There is no money for cash transfers and food for internally displaced people in Nigeria’s Borno State.
So, what is an appropriate African response? Surely not the lamentation that followed the funding cuts. “Aid” created perverse incentives for African countries to abdicate responsibility.
Displaced people’s hunger is a problem for their host country. The insecurity that displaced them is a problem for their country of origin, whose territory is so inhospitable that its citizens have to escape and live (for generations) across borders, waiting interminably for third-country relocation.
If the current US administration is the unicorn that tossed the toys out of the cot, it also created an opportunity for us to extricate ourselves from the perverse incentives of “aid”. The refugees in Kakuma, and the internally displaced people in Borno, deserve nothing less.
The reduction of US AID is a gift. An opportunity to reassert agency, self-reliance, and to eradicate those "perverse incentives". The real challenge will be to persuade our toddler-like leaders to make the paradigm shift and get more strategic and creative... will they listen though?
I think this is interesting and I would love to see a writer up of why Africa is so poor compared to the rest of the world and what this looks like going forward. If African countries can't industrialized and utilize markets to create wealth, are Africans doomed to either stay in their countries or try and move to a West that might not want them there?