Aid: the big, ugly secret

I have had trouble writing this article, because I don’t think I can express the deep disappointment and frustration without the reader having actually having had my experiences. I want to remind people (so they don’t think I’m an ignorant ass) that I’ve had a decent 2 year experience dealing with aid organizations and have had many conversations with aid workers, integrated into communities of people who are competing for aid, talked with people and their perceptions of the west, etc. This is what I have determined.

Aid is a big, rotten apple. It seems so extreme to me; it’s almost like the story about the king who has no clothes. We depend on beauracracies, officials, control agencies and others to be able to judge the value of any given non-market (government or aid) activity, yet for overseas aid work it seems that the naked king himself is giving us the report that yes, actually, the king is clothed. That is, we ask aid “are you helping”, and they say “yes we are”.. And we believe them, time and time again. We believe that aid has a positive effect and the fallacy goes on. Why? There are so many reasons, I’m just going to list them:

1. You can never accurately determine the effects of aid. Aid, like everything, works in the real world and is trying to change concepts as general as “initiative”, “willingness to take negative risks”, “democratic values”, “wellbeing of the population”, etc. It is impossible to determine if you really “increased the wellbeing of the population” or if some other factor did so.
2. Because of the inability to measure the effect of aid, there is a constant fudge factor that aid workers play with when measuring what they’ve done. If the economy has grown 8 percent in a year, I might claim that our program of donating tractors caused some of that 8 percent to happen. If youth’s attitudes have changed about democracy over the course of 5 years, I can claim that our program affected that change. The combination of the fudge factor and the aid is usually done on a competitive contract basis, there is a huge incentive to fudge when things don’t work out. This makes improvement impossible when you can’t even sort out true successes from failures.
3. Even when measured at the small, project level, aid suffers from a host of incentive issues. For example, I am a small projects coordinator who is in charge for economic development in a county. I might be a host country national (a native) or an American, but either way my wage and wellbeing is attached to my ability to “get results” – that is, to show (using methods as close to scientific as possible) that my work caused positive results. Let’s say I have a seminar about using condoms – my proof is the signatures of the participants and perhaps a few pictures. No one shows up – either from lack of interest in the community or lack of promotion on my part. I can forge the signatures (or get my family to sign them) and no one will ever know – because no one really knows what I’m doing but me! There are a thousand and one examples or this and I’m not going to get into them all.
4. The command structure is fundamentally top down. Because government aid is, in the final analysis, politically motivated, it takes a long time for changes on the ground to become changes in the goals and objectives. You can imagine the sort of situations that arise as a result of changing administrations, or how changing issues on the ground can effectively make current overall goals obsolete.
5. Money gets doled out in big chunks. There are companies which contract with government aid organizations to fulfill their goals. For example, the US has 8 million dollars to promote democracy. I can write a competitive contract and win that 8 million dollars from the government, promising to accomplish its stated goal of promoting democracy over 5 years. However, the goal itself could be unrealistic (especially because of the top down command structure) or the goal could be accomplished easily with only 2 million dollars. In either case, you’re wasting a lot of money, though the government probably won’t know it because you can fudge the numbers enough to make it look like a success. In fact, you have to; otherwise you may get a bad reputation and lose the contract for 10 million dollars in aid in some other country, especially many large aid contractors work in a large number of countries.
6. Corruption. This is an easy one and it gets in the press most often because it’s sexy. There is a lot of corruption, some in the direct stealing sense, but mostly plain old immoral favoratism and back scratching.
7. Because of the fear of corruption, sheer amounts of money being handled (especially in third world countries), and difficulty in determing success versus failure, there is a HUGE beauracratic structure in aid organizations. Beauracracy is really about making clear, concise decisions with a fixed rule structure on a large scale. In aid, it is impossible to make decisions clear, and it is often necessary to quickly change the rule structure as situations change.

I think these last two are the most important:

8. There is a constant pool of individuals from donor countries (US, Europe, etc.) who want to travel the world. They are people with varying degrees of wunderlust, and their primary goal is that travel and change should be a permanent part of their jobs. This is a preference, and as a preference it is fine. These are the sort of people who work for embassies or aid organizations who serve 1 – 5 year positions at posts all over the world before switching to another post, from Peru to China to Ghana to Moldova. They are interesting, experienced, worldy, and generally good people. At the start of the career, they are idealistic genuinely want to help. As the rottenness of the apple becomes apparent to them over time, they have different reactions: some become jaded and self-serving, some fudge the numbers and believe their own bullshit, and some hope to change the rottenness from the inside out. Why does no one blow the whistle? If they realize the ineffectiveness of aid, why don’t they tell someone, make a stink? Partly, it’s the simple little reason we love to hate: money. Partly it is their wunderlust and the fact that no other job could provide the travel and lifestyle of this one. And partly because people, like organizations, having difficulty changing course, especially when they’ve been moving in one direction for a while. And so no one blows the whistle. They talk among themselves about the problems, paradoxes, corruption, incompetence, and general inefficiency of aid, but that is all.
9. Finally, and most importantly, there is an endless source of money. The effectiveness of aid is probably last on the list of things that affects government’s decisions to use it. Monetary aid is a form of doing good without knowing exactly how. It’s a way for people to feel good about themselves when they complain about poverty and injustice in the world, their “get out of jail free” card when someone else brings it up. It’s domestic politics, it’s international one-upsmanship, it’s plucking heartstrings, it’s pictures of fly-ridden babies and ox-driven ploughs, it’s a great advertising scheme – and it has nothing to do with what is actually wrong because it can’t ever touch the actual problem.
   

What is the problem? It is simple: you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Don’t ever, ever, ever forget that. If you bring water to the horse, he’ll come to expect you to keep bringing it. If you force his head in the water you can’t tell if he’s drinking anyway. Eventually, he’ll get thirsty and he’ll drink. It might take 10 minutes or it might take 10 years. There’s no sense standing there wasting time waiting for him. Go get something done elsewhere.

We need to take this lesson heart.

But first, we have to be willing to hear it.