Previous post: Aid in Africa: Or “Why do all my great ideas keep flopping?!?”

I’ve got a couple of stories running through my head about why doing aid in Africa doesn’t always work out the way you planned. Imagine for a minute some beautiful thing that you’d like to do to help the poor suffering people in Africa. Maybe you want to dig wells or hand out Bibles. Maybe you’d like to help protect small children or stop deforestation. Great stuff. Huge need. It’ll never work. In fact, in the process of solving these problems, I’ve seen again and again pie-in-the-sky optimists and goody two-shoes like myself crushed by the Aid Monster. The Aid Monster is this enormous demonic being that waits with its slavering mouth and grasping tentacles to divert aid from the needy and fatten its own belly.

The problem is we’re such easy prey. Idealists and change-the-world kinds of people are always blinded by their own self-righteousness to the human depravity that waits to divert their good intentions for personal gain.

After I had been in Africa for several years I thought I was pretty slick. I’d been doing linguistics on my own but thought it would be cool to collaborate with a government agency. My overtures to Education hadn’t gone over very well. My approaches to Culture had been met with smiles but no progress. However the guy at the archive seemed just like my kind of thinker. He loved my ideas. He shared ideas of his own. “Let’s work together!” He said he’d write up some ideas and get back to me. I stopped by a week later and he had a big fat stack of documents waiting for me. Our collaboration entailed my finding $25,000 to fund car hire, staff wages and per-diems, and several trips into the bush for research. “Um, wait. You don’t realize…I don’t have this kind of money.” My friend gave me a hard look and then his eyes glazed over and it was on to other more neutral topics.

What I know now is that government agencies are enormous aid money processing factories. Huge organizations pour millions into a project for HIV/AIDS awareness and the money magically dissolves into the ether to magically reappear in the pockets of a few clever people. What’s happening in Myanmar/Burma shouldn’t be a surprise. It’s the norm. It’s just that the idiots in high places have been less effective at hiding their shenanigans than most governments.

A Bible college I know of wanted to add a new degree program. “No problem,” said the fatcat. “Just give me $6,000 and I’ll take care of it.”

A friend of mine in a nearby country wanted to share his dictionary with the government agency involved in language preservation. “Great. We’d love to,” they replied. Two months later they returned an estimate several hundred pages long detailing how they would work with him with a budget approaching almost half a million US dollars.

When this happens, as someone who has been there, I can tell you that the tendency is to withdraw and “just do it myself.” There’s also an accompanying bitterness that can only be understood by someone who has been through it.

I write all of this as I consider the many great opportunities that await me for collaboration with donors and local organizations. There seems to be a new fad wherein donors want to “actually be involved.” So they blow in, lots of people get together. Lots of goats are killed. Speeches are made. And the donors return home with terrific photos of their ministry in Africa.  It’s a mirage. Folks like me get to stand by and watch the aftermath. It’s not a pretty sight. Either there is no change beyond heartburn from overeating or the foreigners only succeed in propping up marginal members of society with money and motorbikes while the few folks with integrity carry on as before.

I didn’t intend to whine. Or sound so bitter. But most times I feel like this continent would be a lot better off without us. Our indiscriminate and haphazard interference in this region of the world has created a climate of corruption and inertia from which Africa will never recover.