Friday March 7, 2025
They want to be more self-reliant. But that will not be easy
Photograph: AP
CAPE TOWN, KIGALI AND OUAGADOUGOU
ENDING DEPENDENCE on foreign donors would not only lead to prosperity but also to “self-respect for our nation”. Thus argued Nana Akufo-Addo, then the president of Ghana, when he launched his “Ghana beyond aid” policy in 2017.
Eight years later the west African country may indeed move beyond aid—just not in the way it hoped. The post-cold-war era of Western help for Africa is over. The obliteration of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is only the most dramatic example of recent cuts. Britain, France and Germany, among others, are becoming stingier. Even before Elon Musk eviscerated USAID development, wonks were already talking of a “post-aid world”.
For John Mahama, who replaced Mr Akufo-Addo in January, the timing is inauspicious. His predecessor failed in his mission. Instead of prosperity, he led Ghana into default and its 17th IMF bail-out. Yet Mr Mahama sees reason for hope. “It sends a signal to Africa that the time has come for us to be more self-reliant.”
Over the next few years aid cuts will lead to great harm. But Mr Mahama is not alone among African politicians in viewing the crisis as an opportunity for Africa to escape the dependence that has distorted policymaking and sapped self-esteem. The question is whether such a response is more evidence of the complacency that defines many African elites—or whether it will cause them to take more responsibility for the prosperity of their own people.
But before any gain, the pain. In 2023, the latest year for which there are comparable data, rich Western countries spent $60bn on aid in Africa, which is 27% of global aid spending by these countries. For the median African country aid accounts for about 4% of gross national income (GNI), though it ranges from less than 0.5% in fairly rich countries like South Africa to 27% in very poor ones such as Central African Republic (see map).
Map: The Economist
More than a quarter of that money came from America. Most of America’s spending went on public health and humanitarian aid, feeding people caught up in war zones or natural disasters, sometimes through multilateral bodies such as the World Bank and the UN. Smaller amounts went on schemes pursuing goals such as more productive farms and better schools. The Trump administration says it will cut 90% of USAID’s programmes globally, ending some 10,000 projects.
In Washington these are rows on a spreadsheet; in Africa there are lives at stake. In Ethiopia, where almost 16m people required food support in 2024, funding for food aid has stopped. “It’s just a matter of time” before people die, says Charles Owubah of Action Against Hunger, an NGO. In Burkina Faso and Congo, America funds around 50% and 70% respectively of efforts to help people caught up in conflicts there. In Congo the end of American aid will make it harder to respond to diseases such as Ebola.
That is one effect of permanent aid cuts recently outlined by Nicholas Enrich, the top USAID official for global health. He was placed on leave after sending memos warning higher-ups of the looming catastrophe. In one missive that was later made public he estimated that there could be 71,000 to 166,000 additional deaths from malaria and 1m more untreated children with acute malnutrition every year.
Then there is HIV. PEPFAR, a scheme launched by President George W. Bush, has saved more than 25m lives via drugs and prevention. It is now in effect closed. Many African NGOs implementing PEPFAR had their contracts terminated last week; some of their letters ended with “God bless America”. In South Africa, where PEPFAR accounted for 17% of the money spent on HIV treatment and prevention, there will be more than 500,000 excess deaths over the next decade as a result, estimates Linda-Gail Bekker of the University of Cape Town. In poorer African countries, where most anti-HIV costs were covered by PEPFAR, the proportional impact will be worse. Moses Mutumba, whose Ugandan NGO had its contract ended, says there are already many cases of HIV-positive children not getting refills for their medicines.
Aid cuts will have economic effects as well. In 16 African countries USAID funding is at least 1% of GNI, according to data from the Centre for Global Development in Washington, and an important source of foreign exchange. The Institute for Security Studies, a South Africa-based think-tank, estimates that almost 19m more Africans will fall below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line by 2030 if aid from rich countries is permanently cut by 20%. Middle-class Africans working for aid-funded NGOs will lose their jobs, with ripple effects throughout local economies.
Others may fill some gaps. Japan is considering investing in more infrastructure, including the Lobito economic corridor in central Africa that was the flagship project of Joe Biden’s administration. Philanthropists could stump up some extra cash. Humanitarian NGOs and the UN are hoping the Gulf will spend more. But none of these will make up the difference. And though Chinese ambassadors may soon be seen doing more publicity events at African hospitals, China has no interest in replacing what USAID does. It may build a clinic, but it will not staff, supply or run it.
January Makamba, a Tanzanian MP and former foreign minister, sees a paradigm shift on aid. Like many among Africa’s elite, he is ambivalent about the change. He knows aid can do good but aid-dependence is bad. “As Africans we are not completely sad about the developments,” he says. “This is what we have always been saying we want, to rely less on others.”
“Aid creates the wrong incentives for ruling elites,” argues Ken Opalo, a Kenyan scholar at Georgetown University in Washington. It leads policymakers to abrogate responsibility for their countries’ own development and makes them more sensitive to donors than their citizens. Mr Opalo says aid partially causes “the atrophy of elite ambition” that has stunted economic development. Aid can be palliative in the short term but, because of how it affects local politics, it is also corrosive. “You are so dependent on donor partners who pout if the minister himself doesn’t show up,” says W. Gyude Moore, a former cabinet minister in Liberia. “The smaller and poorer your country, the worse this is.”
Going it alone
Self-reliance is a potent idea across Africa. In Ghana the talk of “beyond aid” had deliberate echoes of Kwame Nkrumah, the country’s founding president. Nkrumah spoke of a “new Africa” that would “show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs”. In Burkina Faso Ibrahim Traoré, the 36-year-old military leader, draws on the legacy of Thomas Sankara, a former president sometimes called “Africa’s Che Guevara” who preached self-reliance. “We must try to develop without other countries…it can be a good thing and we will work hard to minimise the impact,” says Samuel Kalkoumdo, an adviser to Mr Traoré.
Some African leaders, like Nkrumah and Sankara before them, call for something close to a mental liberation. Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s president, often uses the word “mindset”. He has said: “It is time to shake off the low expectations that have been attached to Africans and that we, to some extent, have accepted.” Even though Rwanda was until recently a darling of donors, Mr Kagame claims he has never been “a friend of [aid]”, despite being “a beneficiary of it”. Jito Kayumba, an adviser to Zambia’s president, thinks aid cuts could spur African governments to spend more wisely. They are a chance “to build our own capacity, which is an issue of sovereignty and economic independence,” he says.
Ordinary Africans, too, want to rely less on outsiders. A survey in 34 countries between 2019 and 2021 by Afrobarometer, a pollster, found that 65% of respondents wanted their countries to finance their own development, rather than rely on external loans. A majority held that view in all but four countries.
Africans may not be lamenting the aid cuts, argues Bright Simons of Imani, a Ghanaian think-tank, because the Western model of aid “has failed to live up to its own norms of accountability”. A study published in 2023 by academics at Lund University in Sweden found that aid led to weaker fiscal capacity in African democracies, suggesting it got in the way of social contracts between the taxed and the taxer. “In effect, aid-dependent democracies become more autocratic,” say the authors.
Yet it would be naive to think that cutting aid will simply reverse its unintentional harm. Only a few African countries have the fiscal leeway to pay for services once provided by donors. Some 20 poor African countries are in default or at high risk of debt distress. Uganda wants its fired health workers to work without pay.
It is not just about the money. “It’s above all a capacity problem,” says Ronald Osumba of the Tony Blair Institute, which advises African governments. Mr Makamba of Tanzania expects some systems to deteriorate or even collapse. But he hopes the pain will be worthwhile.
And though there is a logic to the idea that less aid means more African responsibility, there is a danger of being a Pollyanna on the savannah. Aid cuts in themselves will not force African governments to do better. Those going hungry or without medicines have little political clout; the middle classes typically use private, rather than donor-funded, services. Perhaps African elites will have a fresh incentive to become more responsive to their citizens. But governments have in the past clamped down on dissent rather than done better jobs. Many Africans expect very little from the state.
Ultimately the aid cuts were “coming down the line”, argues Mavis Owusu-Gyamfi of the African Centre for Economic Transformation, a think-tank in Ghana. She urges the continent to prioritise growth and transformation by integrating markets and moving beyond the extraction and export of raw materials. The end of an era in aid should prove a wake-up call. “And if our leaders don’t wake up, then we have a fundamental problem.” ■
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline “Pain, then gain?”