Foreign Aid: pissing into the wind

By Pete North - June 9, 2021

Returning to the subject of foreign aid, as ever Twitter has managed to turn it into a wholly binary debate between those who think we should stick to the arbitrary 0.7 percent target because reasons, and those who insist charity begins at home. I’m somewhere in the middle as usual, being confused by all the different moving parts.

But then things are going in the right direction. The Integrated Review at least appreciates the necessity to join up aid with trade and foreign policy. That then leaves us puzzling on how to usefully dispose of our aid budget through bilateral relationships. To that there is no easy answer, but it starts with looking how spending can strengthen those bilateral relationships individually, preferably in the mutual interest, with a view to servicing our own foreign policy objectives.

In determining what is worthwhile, as we discussed previously, you first have to ask questions about longevity and sustainability of any aid programme. Infrastructure without security and governance tends to be trashed or stolen in no time at all. Then with social and governance programmes, they tend to fall apart the moment your back is turned. You are then committed to establishing essentially an NGO based civil service for dysfunctional regimes who wouldn’t fund it if you didn’t.

As much as corruption is a problem, there is an inherent lack of competence. China has gifted Pakistan with a number of coal fired power stations to the point where it it has an energy surplus but even as supply surges, electric power is still not reaching up to 50 million people in Pakistan. Power outages also remain common, with a transmission problem in January leaving many of the country’s major cities in the dark. Then when it comes to transport infrastructure, it’s virtually impossible to maintain a safe railway system when vandals and thieves plague every major upgrade. Securing long rail routes is impractical.

In terms of more humanitarian efforts such as disease control, you can only do so much in terms of tackling the symptoms. Malaria and other diseases are a result of poor drainage which more often than not is down to a lack of basic maintenance and poor waste disposal, where sewers become clogged with plastic waste, not least because manhole covers and grates are stolen. You then have the added problem of household waste dumping directly into rivers, exterminating all aquatic lifeforms. And that’s before looking at industrial pollution, again a consequence of endemic corruption across Africa and South Asia. Whatever clean up work is done, without civic enforcement, it reverts to slum conditions pretty much immediately.

Essentially there is nothing much we can do to meaningfully eradicate poverty while the fundamentals of civic society are absent entirely. Concepts such as urban planning are virtually alien to India. They are entire cities with where new skyscrapers are built but with no sewers, no rubbish collection and no pedestrian infrastructure. Building standards are similarly non-existent. There are islands of first world development residing in a sea of dark ages poverty but with twenty-first century pollution. Where does an intelligent aid and development policy even begin to fix problems when there is no real basis for western style civil society?

So here we have to go back to basics. We have to pick our strategic partners, ask them what they need and then assess whether it’s even worth bothering. There is perhaps scope to assist Mediterranean North Africa, but further afield one starts to wonder if a little imperialist egotism is creeping in. We can fiddle around the edges to persuade ourselves we have a global impact but in truth can do nothing at scale that could convince an ever sceptical tax payer to stump up more.

Worse still, most politicians aren’t even thinking about aid in strategic terms. They think of it as a disaster relief slush fund and to help the world’s poor. We’re just not thinking about it on an adult level. The debate is based almost entirely on sentimentalism and jingoistic vanities. Moreover, unless we clean up our own act and prosecute the multinationals and private interests exploiting Africa, bribing regimes and stealing their natural resources, we will perpetuate the problems while barely managing to dent the symptom. To that end I’d rather put a few million in the hands of top international lawyers to go after Canadian mining companies than into the hands of aid NGOs. Maybe then our efforts might have a fighting chance.