For a long time, the West has been obsessed with the quest to find the answer to economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. It continues to pour enormous amounts of money into the “aid” chest, and still sustainable growth rates elude most African nations. Have these funds been entirely wasted? Or, is the West taking the right approach by spending its way to growth in the region?
There is an emerging debate in theoretical circles about the merits of ‘aid’ funding and its’ effectiveness as a poverty reduction strategy. Increasingly, observers are asking whether an alternative strategy needs to be adopted. In fact, many are arguing that institutional support is ineffective and should be replaced by efforts to open agricultural markets in the developed world. Others argue that the ‘aid’ program should not simply be measured against institutional data, and its important structural role has been overlooked. Sub-Saharan Africa has been the recipient of vast sums of ‘aid’ money over the past thirty years and still fails to meet the needs of its growing population. Why has the region not met the expectations of the West? Is economic growth a valid measure of the success of the ‘aid’ program in Africa? Is the ‘aid’ process a useful tool for poverty reduction, or is it merely an ‘industry’ dominated by powerful Western organisations with little concern for the interests of the poor? The panel will consider the implications of the ‘aid’ program in Africa and seek to answer some of the important questions about its role in recent years. The current debate is integral to the issues being discussed concerning ‘globalisation’ and ‘open’ agricultural markets. It is also fundamental to the big issue about how growth affects the environment and what ‘sustainable development’ really means. Should we be allowing Africa to find its own way in the ‘globalised’ world or is there a need to provide continued support? Is the quest for growth in the developing world a valid one, and if so how should it be undertaken?
This contribution explains why the peasants celebrated at the time of 'assistance' (1973-1984) and disqualifies the era of Development (1986-2003) which required from them financial and material input. The paper also discusses the socio-political context which paved the way for (mis)conceptions of 'aid' among the rural people of Timbuctu.
This paper will analyse whether foreign aid has been integrated into the political economy of African society, or even reinforced the tendencies which they were supposed to counter. This will be discussed through an analysis of the promotion of the civil society through foreign aid, and the contemporary role of civil society in Africa: is it an independent actor engendering economic development and political liberalisation; or can it be part of patronage-networks, leading to a further informalisation and privatisation of development?
This paper looks at the programs that donors have on reform of justice, as part of the 'democratic governance' discourses. It includes an overview of interviews with donors and justice sector representatives, to know about the "organizational landscape", their perspectives, the interrelations among them etc. The point of departure is a comparison made for the Spanish- Portuguese Conference on African Studies (Jan. 2004) between the "extroversion" of the postcolonial state in Equatorial Guinea and Mozambique. This concept of Bayart, and another similar proposed by F. Cooper (gate keeper state), to analyse how international connections of African states is working nowadays, is the context of the governance discourse. The comparison with Equatorial Guinea is used, where aid is less and less relevant for the country, and a dependence on oil production has emerged.
Institutionalized development is dominated by the idea that the main adversities of this process, in Africa, are dysfunctions of local organizational and institutional structures. Supposedly, these dysfunctions prevent the 'aid' given to African societies from achieving its 'development' objectives. However, this perspective is being challenged by certain organizational theories (of Sociology), sustaining that current societies are mostly shaped and change in an isomorphic way, in terms of organizational and institutional rationalities, and that the most important factors in this rationalization operate in a context more and more global. This communication (i) identifies some of the factors that are in the base of these isomorphic tendencies, in the case of African societies that 'benefit' from 'aid', and (ii) suggests that the adversities of the 'development' are consequences of the operation of the 'Development Cooperation' complex itself.
This paper looks at how development planning has been utilised in the delivery of aid funds and how different approaches can have different outcomes in relation to human welfare. In particular, it looks at how new epistemologies might be applied to the development program and how planning feedback can lead to more successful outcomes. The paper will utilise key assessments of aid projects in Mozambique and present how they have gone about the planning process. It will then consider new frameworks for the planning process and seek to critically evaluate how preparation has been fundamental to development outcomes in the past.