Foreign aid takes new approaches
The Present
Kristine Chan, a junior, has a job to earn her own spending money, but her parents pay for her necessities. Yarah Meijer, a junior, doesn’t have a job, but an allowance from her parents has to cover every expense she may have. Both young women are being assisted financially by their parents, but they both acknowledge that someday they will be supporting themselves. Isn’t independence the goal in development?
Humanitarian aid from parent countries hasn’t worked that way.
Without even accounting for the contributions of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), according to the Congressional Research Service, total spending for U.S. foreign assistance was about $49 billion in 2015, about 1.3 percent of the federal budget.
There are projects to bring water to rural African cities, food to victims of war in Syria, toys to poor children in Russia, vaccines to impoverished nations in Latin America, anything imaginable to help people in need all over the world.
However, rich great powers have been attempting humanitarian, economic, and political foreign aid since European colonialism, yet U.S. spending on foreign aid is almost as high as it was directly post-World War II, when much of the European continent needed rebuilding.
It’s ongoing and America isn’t alone. In 2016, the United Kingdom spent £13.4 billion on overseas aid for developing countries as well, and according to the Canadian International Development Platform, Canada’s international aid spending totaled CAD$5.4 billion in 2016.
One could argue that the reason many nations are still entangled in humanitarian aid is that needs can change, therefore a situation can be regularly readdressed and yield different results.
This would be the equivalent of getting more bills as you get older and your parents still paying all of them. Supporting an entire nation forever would be like living in your parents’ basement for the rest of your life.
In theory, assisting a less-developed nation should allow it to participate in the modern world on its own someday, and maintain itself. The aid would end at some point, rather than readdress similar needs every few years.
However, the projects that have been implemented by various organizations by their very nature do not create lasting change, as they are unsustainable in the country that the project is implemented. Because projects have required advanced maintenance and specialized tools, the community itself often doesn't have the resources to keep them functioning, and the initial purpose of the project is lost.
David Damberger, founder of the Calgary chapter of Engineers Without Borders, illustrated this issue when he addressed the water problem in Malawi in his 2016 TED Talk. He recounted how the World Bank stated that 80 percent of people in Malawi had access to fresh water sources through gravity-fed water systems. However, when Damberger went to Malawi, he found out that 81 of the 113 water systems had broken and the people didn’t have the technology to repair it. And, a lot of the systems had been placed near older systems with the same technology, built by another country ten years earlier, also broken. Not only was the technology too advanced for a small rural community to maintain, resulting in a loss of that resource, this situation brought to light another issue in foreign aid: communication.
NGOs compete in giving aid. There are approximately 1.5 million NGOs in the United States working to bring about some sort of change. This many organizations, each with a slightly different agenda and rivalries with each other, can yield misevaluation of needs in a rush to get to the problem first, resulting in ineffective assistance and diversion of resources from a needy source. Then, later, there is rarely communication about what has been done, what went well, and what didn’t work, so there is little learning from the experience.
To illustrate: ten years ago, geographer Elizabeth Dunn conducted a research project about how refugees from the Georgia-Russia conflict used humanitarian aid from government agencies and NGOs to rebuild their lives. She lived with over 2,500 people in one of the resettlement camps and observed that large boxes full of used stuffed animals were frequently delivered, even though the average age of the camp residents was 54. The stuffed animals ended up being useless for a majority of the residents and they kept coming. Aid providers had failed to communicate with the refugees they were trying to help, which resulted in unusable support materials while the refugees were still in need of aid.
Plus, the standardization of processes prevented the flow of unused teddy bears from stopping, which is another issue that organizations face: not every place can solve its problems with a standardized solution.
The Issue
It happens over and over and over - in the Middle East, in Africa, in Latin America. It happens for each and every government with a foreign aid budget and every single one of the nearly 3 million NGOs across the world. The situation is recounted in book after book, written by someone with good intentions who ended up locked in the system of ineffective aid - and it keeps happening with every imposition of technology and the disconnections among need, realism, and communication.
The Future
So what do we do if we’ve failed? What do we do when the projects we implement are unsustainable and the technology we give isn’t working?
We stop giving it.
According to recent research regarding foreign aid, the technology that is given does not focus on the assets within the country that allow it to help itself. Currently, foreign aid is an imposition of highly advanced technology from a theoretically better nation.
So, we modify it.
Instead of giving countries in need what we think they need, they tell us what they need, like how Meijer’s allowance pays for what she thinks she needs. Then, instead of implementing our technology to solve their problem, we let them create the change they deem necessary, like how Chan has a job to get her own spending money.
It’s as easy as ABCD, according to DePaul University, Chicago. They have a whole institute devoted to ABCD: Asset Based Community Development. The model focuses on building a sustainable environment in a community that addresses its specific needs, using strengths and assets already available in the community. According to ScholarWorks.gvsu, ABCD will be the end to the current and ineffective methods of foreign aid that create dependency rather than solutions.
The Change
The change has already begun. Engineers Without Borders has taken a very public step in admitting shortcomings in the current aid model by publishing an annual fail report. Foreign Affairs Magazine has even promoted books about ineffective global humanitarian aid. Blockbuster books are coming out, such as “Dead Aid” by Dambisa Moro, detailing failures in the psychology of aid as well as aid process.
However, in order to completely change the direction of foreign aid, the acknowledgement of its shortcomings can’t stop with just talking about it. It’s about believing it.
“Being a catalyst for social change, opposed to simply being an American providing help, you leave a lasting impact on the community you’re assisting. You can create a project using the community’s resources that will directly benefit them and will be sustainable,” said Lizzy Hall, a member of AMIGOS de las Americas. “Learning this process shaped me into the person I am today.”