Can Development Aid ever be Anti-Racist?
Guest blog by Neha Kagal
Since Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced cuts to the UK’s international aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% (of gross national income) there has been visible dismay, disappointment and concern over the UK Government’s decision in International Development circles. The irony that this decision was announced on 25th November, the International Day to End Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) was not lost on anyone. Leading INGOs put out joint collective statements condemning the move; not only because Sunak’s decision appeared to be backtracking on a historic commitment enshrined in law, but also because of justifiable fear that this will not remain a temporary measure. Given that we are in the midst of a global pandemic that has only worsened inequalities, critics argue that the decision to cut back on aid will impact the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people at a time when disease, poverty, climate change and conflict continue to devastate lives.
I write this piece as an intersectional feminist who is a citizen of the global South and currently working in an INGO in the global North. I too am concerned by the UK government’s brazen backtracking on their 0.7% commitment and what this might mean for the women and girls whose lives in many ways depend upon UK aid. At the same time, I am equally dismayed by the response of the international development sector to this news, particularly of INGO’s who not so long ago made public statements of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement alongside commitments to being anti-racist.
Telling the truth: Disrupting hegemonic narratives around ‘development’
In response to the budget cuts, a resounding plea from across the international development sector has been to think about the impact of these cuts on ‘Britain’s image in the world’ and ‘Britain’s power on the global stage’. Sarah Champion MP, chair of the International Aid Select Committee, remarked “I think we can wave goodbye to the development superpower status that we have proudly had for so long.” These sentiments were echoed by others in the sector. The executive director of a leading INGO stated in an interview “….now is not the time to be turning our backs on those in need. The world is crying out for global leadership and this decision sends the message that the UK doesn’t want the job. Is this what a world-leading, global Britain is supposed to look like? (emphasis added). Similarly, the CEO of another INGO was quoted as saying “the announcement by the chancellor is unprincipled, unjustified and profoundly harmful both to Britain’s reputation and more importantly to millions of people around the world (emphasis added).”
The tone of these complaints are neo-imperialist at worst and paternalistic at best. Not only do they reinforce racialised narratives of who gets to ‘rescue’ whom, but they also unashamedly claim a monopoly on ‘global leadership’ of development issues. It seems that the ‘development superpower status’ that Champion is referring to has been built into the national psyche of the UK without any interrogation of how this so-called ‘superpower’ status has been acquired and at what costs.
We are fed the story that poor countries are poor because of bad governance, institutional corruption and authoritarian regimes. On the other hand rich countries like Britain are rich because of their own brilliance and hard work, and therefore it is their ethical and moral ‘duty’ to give generously to the poor. Therefore when money is handed out through Britain’s aid budget there is an underlying sense of benevolence attached to it; an attitude of benign charity, tinged with a belief that somehow as a rich country we have a moral obligation to ensure that poorer countries can ‘improve’ themselves. Many of us in the international development sector unconsciously or consciously embody these attitudes.
The problem with this story is that it invisibilizes the connection between the wealth of rich countries and the poverty of poor ones. We know that rich countries like the UK have grown rich not in spite of poor countries, but because of them. In order to address various issues of ‘development’, we need to start making linkages between presenting ‘problems’ and their origins. Present-day poverty and destitution cannot be decoupled from colonial processes of appropriation and accumulation, enslavement, forced transportation of millions of people, extraction of surplus through exploitation, unfair taxation and unequal trade, shifting of resources away from productive activities, and enforced de-industrialisation. The ‘under-development’ of the global South did not happen in a vacuum-it was a strategic and systematic process from which countries like the UK benefited enormously. For example, prior to colonisation, India commanded 27% of the world economy. By the time the British left, India’s share had been cut to just 3%*.
Furthermore, present-day global economic and trade systems continue to impoverish poor countries and profit-rich ones. Countries like the UK actively undermine people’s rights to education, healthcare and employment in the global South. Through unfair trade deals and loan conditionalities of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (in which the UK plays a powerful decision-making role), some of the poorest countries in the world are forced to cut back on essential public spending, for example in heath-care and education, in order to facilitate the entry of overseas capital investment. This put simply, impoverishes their populations. Research by feminist economists has found that six countries, including Ghana, Zambia and Sierra Leone, are spending more on debt servicing than they are on health and education combined, massively depleting urgently-needed resources for quality, universal gender-responsive public services, infrastructure, and social protection**.
Therefore returning money to these countries that the UK has spent hundreds of years exploiting (and continues to exploit) is not an act of charity, but a matter of rights. What is needed is reparation for the harms being done, not monies handed out as ‘charity’ and certainly not a means to further one’s own interests. My discomfort stems from the fact that the outcry around 0.7 was predicated upon harmful narratives of UK’s position on the global stage, as well as a white-saviour mentality of ‘not turning our backs on the world’s poorest and most marginalised’. Alarmingly, there was no umbrage at the fact that reducing aid spending is tantamount to denying countries in the global South money that, many would argue, is rightfully theirs.
For development aid to be conceived of through an anti-racist lens, it needs to situate its work within multiple contexts of colonisation, imperialism, expansion of neo-liberal markets, trade policies, and war. We need to move away from the language of ‘development’ and begin conceptualising the work that needs doing through a framework of freedom, rights and solidarity.
What we are up against are global systems of power and inequality, and many of us continue to benefit from these very systems. This is where our focus should be.
We need to begin disrupting narratives around ‘underdevelopment’ being a problem that is ‘just is’, and instead start questioning how this came into being. INGO’s need to acknowledge the debt that the UK owes to the rest of the world. Recognising, acknowledging, and working from an understanding of histories of oppression, colonisation, and empire is foundational for engaging within development aid through an anti-racist lens.
Bringing it closer home: What can INGOs do?
It is also important to state at this point that the issue with the cuts to aid is not solely about how much money is distributed as development aid, but also of how we use this money to secure the rights of the most marginalised, especially women and girls in the global South. This includes making decisions that impact who the money goes to and what proportion of aid money reaches them. The European Network on Debt and Development estimates that 90% of British aid goes to British firms (including INGO’s) with only 3% ending up in the global South***.
In the case of women and girls' rights, research by AWID reveals that an alarming 99% of gender-related international aid fails to reach women’s rights and feminist organizations directly****. The bulk of funding earmarked for gender inequality goes to international organisations based in the Northern donor countries, with only 1% of gender-focused aid reaching Southern-led feminist groups*****.
As INGO’s who benefit significantly from our proximity to Northern donors, where does that leave us in our attempts to ‘become anti-racist’?
I would suggest that the first step would be to hold ourselves accountable by asking some (uncomfortable) questions such as:
- How might development aid be used as a means to repair generations of harm, disenfranchisement and impoverishment?
- How can we ensure that funds go directly to local, grassroots organisations and social movements?
- What barriers to this exist and are we willing to dismantle these barriers?
- Can we summon the courage to stand up to institutional donors who demand cumbersome reporting structures, laborious documentation and complicated financial systems that automatically disqualify small, local organisations from applying for funding?
- Can we imagine and work towards leaner northern-based organizations with expertise located and rooted in the South?
- How can we begin reducing the size, scale and authority of headquarters in the global North?
- How can we commit to ensuring that we move money away from the salaries of staff and consultants in the North to experts with lived experience and expertise in the countries where aid is being targeted?
- How can we ensure that we do not use up a significant proportion of aid funding in relentless internal restructures, away-days, international travel, per-diems, ‘security’ training and so on?
If we begin to recognise that the money we receive through UK aid is not ours to have; and instead belongs back in those countries that were (and are) actively impoverished by the UK then we can attend to our work with more humility, from a sense of undoing the harms that are being done and ensuring that we do not embody and perpetuate racialised patterns of power and hierarchy within our own ways of working.
My time working in the development sector has shown me clearly that there are those who live in poverty and then those of us who live off poverty. Unless we engage in transformative change- the kind that fundamentally disrupts the systems and structures we currently work within- INGO’s will continue to benefit from people being poor.
This is because the development industry perpetuates itself through continued racialised inequality in its institutions and in how it conceptualises and engages with people in the global South. No amount of education, ‘empowerment’, ‘awareness generation, and ‘capacity-building can make up for the historic and present-day systemic impoverishment of the world’s poor. Development aid is like trying to pour water into a bucket with a hole. The hole is systemic inequality and injustices that are held in place by a racist global system. Although we will never be able to fill the bucket, we will always feel superior/entitled/benevolent/charitable because we were trying to.
What we need however is to plug the hole, and stop the leak. And for this we need political will and the courage to be honest with ourselves. We need to be honest about what international development is, where it comes from, and how our racial, gendered and northern/southern positionalities impact how we use and distribute aid. The less money that is available, the greater our responsibility as a sector to ensure that it is spent in ways that uphold the dignity of the world’s poorest, to insist that they are central to decision-making about their lives and can engage with change as active rights-holders. This level of honesty and self-reflection is incredibly rare, despite performative language around anti-racism in the sector.
As INGO’s we can use this time as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and how we choose to spend aid money. We can commit to being less top-heavy, reduce layers of internal racialised hierarchies and time-consuming and expensive bureaucracy, begin foregrounding the skills, resources and expertise in the South and pool our intellectual and monetary resources. We need to reimagine aid not as some benign charitable undertaking but as a reparative mechanism to balance historical injustices.
As long as we continue to operate within systems that perpetuate hierarchy, inequality and unequal distribution of power, development aid can never be anti-racist.
This is an opportunity. Let us approach it with humility and the willingness to do better.
*Angus Maddison (2007). Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
** ActionAid (2020). Who Cares For the future: Finance Gender Responsive Public Services https://actionaid.org/publications/2020/who-cares-future-finance-gender-responsive-public-services
***https://www.eurodad.org/development-untied-2018
***** https://www.awid.org/publications/toward-feminist-funding-ecosystem-framework-and-practical-guide
