Douglas Carswell's Blog

Aid and Africa

How can rich Western countries help Africa? Having grown up in Uganda, one of Africa's poorest countries, it's a question I've heard asked for as long as I can remember. 

Yet judging by the evidence, it's not something Western governments have yet found the answer to.

Forty years ago, many African countries had per capita incomes comparable with many other counties in Asia and Latin America - countries that were once collectively referred to as "the third world". 

Yet while countries like Thailand, Vietnam and Brazil have developed middle income economies, much of sub-Saharan Africa remains impoverished.  If aid is about helping Africa, and not just about making Westerners feel good about themselves, now might be a good time to ask what has gone wrong.

One of the biggest flaws in our current approach to aid is the fact it is so often a government-to-government subsidy - so-called “budget support”.  And if you subsidise more government in Africa, you get more government – and, inevitably, more Mercedes Benz.  It’s not really very Big Society.

Even if all the money is spent the way it is supposed to be, budget support means that many African governments rely on HMG, and other Western governments, for a large slice of their annual spend.  Rather than answer downward to local taxpayers, they increasingly answer to the international aid community.  How does that assist democratic development in Africa?  It actively hinders it.

Giving UK tax revenue to African governments to spend as their budget revenue has done little to actually develop Africa. We in the West have – I hope – ditched that fabian faith in the ability of the state to achieve social and economic progress. Yet we continue to spend our aid budget in Africa as if we believed Big Government had all the answers.

If Western aid budgets have successfully bought a lot of vaccinations, they have also paid for a lot of 4x4s – and all the other paraphernalia of top heavy, costly to run NGO-led programmes. We ought to be channelling money through existing, African institutions and organisations. A $ million spent on childhood vaccinations is more likely to buy a $ million of vaccinations if delivered through, say, the local Catholic hospital, than if it was channelled through the Lords of Poverty.    

More than any aid programme, we might help Africa more by removing many of the restrictions and tariffs that lock African producers out of Western markets (not that any Westminster politicians have any say over UK trade policy any more). When EU restrictions on fish imports were imposed on some African countries a few years ago, it had a devastating impact on foreign exchange earnings – and on local fishermen.

Today, David Cameron has talked about reforming the way that we spend our aid budget. I hope he succeeds. 

At present, our aid budget is not always spent in response to Africa’s real needs, nor is it spent by those properly accountable to anyone you voted for. Rather it gets spent the way that the permanent aid quangocracy wants. Approximately half our aid budget is now under EU control. All my dealings with DfID officials have made it pretty clear that the rest gets spent the way those DfID officials want – not anyone you voted for.

A lack of accountability over how our aid budget is spent ultimately explains why it has been spent so badly.  More accountability might also make the taxpayer less sceptical.

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