Everyone agrees the aid system is broken. No one agrees why. 

From an article by Fight Global Poverty

Benny Dembitzer is a British economist who has specialized in international economic development issues and consequences of climate change, in particular in the economies of sub-Saharan Africa.

He is Visiting Professor of Global Economics at the China Centre of University College, London and a Rockefeller Fellow. He has worked for a variety of NGOs and United Nations' agencies. His work has taken him to 35 different countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as Indonesia, Pakistan, Chile and Brazil. He was director of the European Office of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, when the organization was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

His book, The Global Famine Game, is his account of how a system meant to feed and lift the poorest has learned, instead, to feed itself. It is aimed at the ordinary person of goodwill in the “rich world” who deeply cares about the wider world and does not understand why horrendous poverty has not been solved after years of public appeals. If you want to understand how we reached the point where so much money moves and so little of it reaches the people at the end of the chain, that is what the book is for.

In a recent blog, Benny gives an example. He was invited to OECD’s 2026 conference on the future of development co-operation in Paris. The focus was “The Future of Development Cooperation, Charting Strategic Directions.” The delegates did agree on one thing, that very little can stay the same but there was virtually no agreement on what to do about it. As one Government minister put it well, "Ask a room full of people whether change is needed, and they will all agree that it is. Ask each of them whether they will be making any changes themselves, and the answer is always no." 

Most of the participants represented governments or government institutions, but almost none was a decision-maker, none the kind of person who cares about action or results. Instead there were researchers, influencers, academics, professors, research assistants, and young interns. Two days of clever people, real resources and serious talk, and the people the whole enterprise exists to serve were barely in the room. Not as participants. Not, in the end, even as the point.

So the question in development is not whether the system works. It is what to do about the fact that it doesn't. Criticism of the aid system has gone mainstream. Economists, anthropologists, Global South leaders, Nobel laureates, people who agree on almost nothing else, have arrived at the same uncomfortable conclusion:

The system, as built, is failing the people it claims to serve.

What they do not agree on is why, or what to do next. And that disagreement is the most useful conversation we can have. So here are some of the voices, and where they pull apart.

Dambisa Moyo, the economist behind Dead Aid, put it as bluntly as anyone, “Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world.”  Her cure leans on markets, trade and private capital. Benny does not fully agree with her. He thinks the problem is more structural than markets alone can fix. But she reached the diagnosis honestly, and she forces a real question.

Sir Angus Deaton, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2015, came at it from the data. He found that, “large inflows of foreign aid change local politics for the worse and undercut the institutions needed to foster long run growth.” When a government is funded from abroad, it answers less to its own people, and the slow work of building accountable institutions quietly erodes.

Degan Ali, who founded the Kenyan organisation Adeso, that made cash transfers a significant, legitimate method of delivering aid to vulnerable populations, names the politics the others circle around. The system, she says, “created a very good way of self-perpetuating because you have made the cost of speaking out, the cost of challenging the system, very expensive for people, financially expensive.” A system that punishes honesty will not reform itself from the inside.

Themrise Khan, after nearly thirty years in the sector, reframes the whole thing as a question of power. The issue, she argues, is not how much aid people need. It is why they need it at all, and how little say they have over how it is used.

And Benny Dembitzer lands somewhere of his own. He does not want aid abolished. He wants it rebuilt, so that it answers to communities rather than to the funders and institutions that have learned to live off the problem. 

Five serious people. One shared diagnosis. Five different cures.

That is not a weakness in the argument. It is the argument. Anyone who tells you the answer is simple, whether that answer is “give more” or “cut it all,” is selling you something. The honest position is that the system is failing, the reasons are contested, and the way forward has to be worked out in the open.

Before you give any more donations to help people overseas, you should perhaps at least ask the following questions:

• "Why do I need to donate to a Western agency when I can donate directly to organisations in-country that address the issue I'm interested in?" Is giving to a Western agency an easy, feel-good option? There are many good organisations working in-country who work alongside local communities and are very effective. Many are linked with churches. Why not research and build relationships with them? Money is easy to transfer.
• "How much of my donation reaches the people at the end of the chain?" A lot of monies given to Western charities and agencies could end up covering fundraising expenses, consultants, airfares, etc.
• "How much say does the local community have in the way the monies are spent?" Western saviorism might mean monies are spent on projects which will be abandoned once the NGO staff leave.

Read Benny's article here.

See also these articles:
Poverty Cure 
Beyond Aid - employment is the foundation of poverty alleviation
Three reasons anti-poverty programs don’t work, and how there’s a better way
How to make poverty history?