By Victoria Butanu
Official development assistance (ODA) is defined as government aid that is designed to promote the economic development and welfare of developing countries.
To be more specific, development aid is an honorable humanitarian act by stronger, richer countries to share their resources, expertise and technologies with the developing world, war-torn countries, and countries hit by emergencies. The achievements of development aid are remarkable, and, in many ways, lifesaving and include creating access to clean drinking water, reducing infant mortality rates, and promoting education.
There are areas around the world with almost no access to healthcare, where diseases that are treatable or which have been eradicated in the rest of the world are still ravaging large portions of the population. There are countries torn by armed conflict, with thousands of displaced people fearing for their safety, and lacking basic essentials. The western world would betray its principles if it were to take a wait and see approach while such atrocities take place.
ODA provided in 2019
Thus, in 2019 ODA provided by the member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) totaled USD152.8billion and the EU and its member states contributed €75.2 billion, according to preliminary data revealed by DAC.
The EU’s collective assistance accounted for 0.46% of EU Gross National Income (GNI) in 2019, slightly lower than the 0.47% in 2018, but remaining significantly above the 0.21% average of the non-EU members of the DAC. In 2019 four EU Member States met their ODA commitments of providing 0.7% or more of their GNI in ODA: Luxembourg, Sweden and Denmark as well as the United Kingdom.
Nevertheless, the EU Commissioner for International Partnerships, Jutta Urpilainen has expressed her concern regarding the collective effort being at its lowest since 2016.
“I call on all Member States and all development actors to re-double their efforts. The current coronavirus crisis shows how interdependent we all are and how important it is to step up support to our partner countries as Team Europe”, she said.
Drawbacks of development aid process
Amidst calls for higher amounts of development aid, there are also voices from within the development aid community urging for a change in the aid process.
“Sometimes, the very best of intentions can lead to disaster”, believes Abhishek Parajuli, Nepal’s former youth ambassador to the UN. “Foreign aid and a lack of taxation switches off accountability demands – people care less because the grants to the governments are free, people don’t care as much as they should, which causes corruption, which, in turn, hurts development. Aid is counterproductive, not just wasteful.”
There is evidence that in countries torn by war, goods received by the public via aid are the target of theft by organized gangs that then sell these goods to buy more ammunition.
“The reason why we cannot help the vulnerable communities of the world is that our interventions are more about us, a celebration of who we are and who we think we are. When the west engages with other societies, it sets up an aid relationship which has very little to do with helping others and more to do with disciplining them, reforming them, to become more like us, western capitalists, liberal, democratic states. However, it took Western Europe over 200 years of struggle and violence to achieve state maturity, but a country like Afghanistan has a minute or a decade to accomplish the main task”, says Maliha Chishti, a researcher of war and post-conflict peacebuilding.
In other words, a desire seems to have been expressed that the way aid performed is decolonized, as criticism of development aid revolves around the fact that aid workers apparently enter an area with certain preconceived ideas about what is needed on the ground.
Eventual solutions
However, this does not mean aid should be stopped. There are emergency interventions that need to be funded much more heavily. When it comes to development aid, a redesign of the funding is necessary. Abhishek Parajuli suggests one should work with human nature and understand how human incentives work. One of his suggestions is making developing countries seek the payment for more taxes by its citizens so that they then demand more back from their governments. This may not work in all situations, as many people from developing countries are extremely poor while paying indirect taxes. Another approach is to enable people to realize how much tax they are already paying.
Advocates suggest that development aid should become more innovative in order to be as efficient as the humanitarian goal behind it is. One major way to do this would be to put refugees or others in need at the center of the aid process and have them choose the aid best suited for them. The developing countries are very complex. Perhaps, a solution would be for the western aid establishment to step back and allow other countries and societies to do more, to imagine and create their future based on their own terms, their own cultural and political trajectories.
As the world is evolving, so are its problems and the solutions to them. As the world is becoming more interconnected, the international development sector seems to being asked to adapt by removing itself from center stage, and working in a more balanced tandem with those it seeks to help.
