CGD in the News

Sharing the Burden (Foreign Policy)

April 3, 2012

Senior fellow Charles Kenny's weekly column in Foreign Policy.

From the article:

It's 113 years since Rudyard Kipling -- poet propagandist for empire -- exhorted Americans, newly ensconced as the colonial power in the Philippines, to "Take up the White Man's burden/The savage wars of peace/Fill full the mouth of Famine/And bid the sickness cease." A century and change later, a new survey suggests people in the rich world have attitudes towards developing countries that would make Kipling proud. And not only are their views completely out of touch with what is going on in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, but they are positively harmful to continued progress in the developing and rich worlds alike.




A recent study in Britain suggested that the dominant image of developing countries remains "malnutrition and pot-bellied young children desperate for help with flies on their faces." Perhaps that's not surprising when a survey by journalist Marlon Miller looking at ten years of Africa coverage by major U.S. print media found the most common topic of articles was conflict, corruption, and crime. Or when well-intentioned efforts to mobilize support for famine relief orbringing war criminals to justice in Africa tend to emphasize the worst of the continent and play up the role of outsiders.

But the stereotype of Africa's helplessness at the hands of its violent and kleptocratic governments is a real problem -- not least for those trying to help. To be somewhat simplistic, it suggests that the continent is locked in a dark-age hell-hole. There's close to "a universal feeling that efforts have longbeen made to combat poverty in places like Africa and yet little has changed" suggests a Britishstudy. And there's a common explanation for why that's the case, according to Intermedia. Only between 16 percent (in France) and 29 percent (in Britain) of interested citizens in rich countries disagreed with the statement that "most financial aid to developing countries [is] wasted." Between 44 percent (in the United States) and 66 percent (France) agreed.

Other surveys point in the same direction -- and suggest that this cynicism has an impact on support for foreign aid. Between September 2008 and February 2010, while the percentage of people in the United Kingdom suggesting that corruption in poor country governments makes it pointless to give money climbed from 44 percent to 57 percent, support for increased government action to reduce global poverty slipped from 49 percent to 35 percent. In the United States, meanwhile, the median respondent suggests that 60 percent of U.S. aid money ends up in the hands of corrupt government officials -- which might help to explain why so few Americans support increasing budgets for foreign aid.

Even people of goodwill in the West are stuck with a bad case of the white man's burdencomplex, then: We must help, because they are so helpless. That attitude leads to bad aid -- the type run out of donor-country capitals with little involvement of beneficiary governments or citizens on the ground -- with the irony that reams-worth of evaluation studies suggest it is exactly this aid that is some of the most likely to fail. It also leads to aid fatigue: "What? They're still helpless after all our help?" Worse, it surely depresses other powerful forms of engagement between North and South -- like private investment, trade, and travel. Who would think of setting up a factory or going on holiday to a region supposedly engulfed in war, run by crooks and psychopaths, and starving to the last man?



That's a message charities and aid agencies themselves should be hammering home at every opportunity, not just because it is right, but out of self interest. Because it is the immense progress that we've seen in the developing world that provides the best evidence that aid can play a role in support of change. After all, if there hadn't been any change, there wouldn't be anything to take credit for. As it is, there's enough good news around that aid agencies taking only partial credit can still claim spectacular returns to their investments.

Focus groups among interested citizens in the West carried out by Intermedia suggest that important "triggers to engagement" when it came to activities like donating or volunteering were an emotional response to something they saw or heard, evidence that development efforts could have positive outcomes and a sense of empowerment -- that they could make a difference. But the trick for aid organizations that want to sustain commitment and work effectively with the developing world is to ensure that the sense of empowerment among their supporters doesn't involve a feeling that aid recipients are powerless. The message -- and the truth -- is that aid works when it supports people in the developing world in their immense, ongoing, and incredibly successful efforts to make their own lives better.

Read it here.