OP-ED: Donors need to step up and support democracy in Africa

Europe spends more than €21-billion in development aid in Africa every year. It is responsible for more than half of all aid globally. There’s more. In addition to seven civilian and military European missions deployed across sub-Saharan Africa, the EU has committed no less than €1.4-billion to educational programmes in Africa over the past five years.

In part, as the OECD report highlights, Europe’s problems spring from its aid approach. Much is sprayed around by too many institutions into too many countries and projects, driven by institutional interests and the preferences of its 28 member-states. The use of geographic and thematic instruments, bilateral and multilateral “funnels”, and bodies which have different mandates all incur overheads and pose challenges of coherence.

Recipients who need the aid most are not well placed to use it well. It’s a terrible tautology. Given that the recipients who really need development assistance most are, by definition, weak and lacking governance, they will likely waste it otherwise they probably would not need it in the first instance.

And in part Europe’s performance reflects its inability to get the politics right and in so doing to play to its strengths.

But entrenching democracy, rather than authoritarianism, requires supporting the systems and institutions that enable it, and calibrating aid accordingly. African governments will likely resist such support on the grounds that such “conditionality” smacks of neo-colonialism or sovereign interference. But African governments cannot claim such interference when they take aid.

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