Our donors, who art abroad, hallowed be thy purse. Thy aid come in dollars and pounds. Thy will be done in our countries, as promoted by Bono. Give us this day, our yearly funding. And lead us not into self-reliance. But deliver us from ourselves. For thine are dollars, the pounds and the euros, forever and ever. Amen – Elnathan John – Becoming Nigerian: A guide
On the 24th of February Ghana became the first country to receive a shipment of Covid-19 vaccines through the multilateral Covax facility. Throughout the pandemic (and one could argue throughout the post-colonial period) Africa has been the worlds charity case. Asking for and receiving billions of dollars of donations of PPE, sanitation supplies, and now vaccines. While all of this is lovely it is highly problematic. Relying on the generosity of the developed world to help us respond to crises or define our development agenda is tantamount to giving up our agency over those same issues, and it allows our political leaders to outsource responsibility for development or crisis response.
While the lack of vaccines, testing capacity, PPE is blamed on hoarding by the rich world, which is true, it should also be blamed our own inability to manufacture vaccines, testing materials or PPE. This is down to the bad leadership which outsourced development policy to those, with money and good intentions with pet issues, those who think that intellectual property is more important than responding to a global pandemic.
As millions around the world get vaccinated and Africa, reliant on the charity of others gets left behind to become the Covid continent. Hopefully, it brings us to the realization that charity is not policy. Over the last year, I have devoted much (virtual) ink to looking at how Africa could re-imagine capitalism for itself, forge a post-pandemic vision of development, stimulate our economies and measures we could take to respond to the crisis. All of that is useless, if we do not take responsibility for our own development and recognize that charity is not policy.
The problem with charity as policy
The problems associated with development aid and assistance charity in Africa are well documented. The creation of bloated self-serving bureaucracies that have little or no impact while allowing ex-pats to live charmed lives on the continent. Trillions of dollars spent with little to show for it. The self-serving nature of most spending which is spent on consultants and companies from the originating country. The use of aid to push various geopolitical agendas and to buy the support of African governments. However, this is not the most corrosive aspect of aid and charity on the continent that comes in two forms.
First, it robs us of our agency. Our development agenda is decided in London, Berlin, Washington, Beijing, and Geneva, in board rooms at various foundations and charitable organizations. It rarely has anything to do with what the “targeted” African communities actually want or need. Should massive infrastructure projects be the focus of our development spending, maybe, or maybe not, but that agenda was driven by the multilateral development organizations. The various development fads of microlending, SME/entrepreneur/youth/gender empowerment, digital identity etc. have all primarily come out of western research and institutions. If African development is not driven by the stated wants needs and aspirations of its people, then it does not serve them but the agenda of others. Charity serves the agenda of those doing the giving, not the receiving.
Second, aid and charity enable governments to outsource their responsibilities. Why should the Nigerian government bother to provide real services to the people of the oil-rich Delta region when the Oil companies will spend billions in building schools, clinics, and roads as part of their CSR. Why bother devoting real resources and policy to healthcare, health research and public health finance if the Gates Foundation, US-AID, The Wellcome Trust, and other donors are all pumping money into it. When you outsource responsibilities, you lose control of them as others decide what the focus of the money will be. Thus, our health systems have severely undeveloped but critical elements (like blood services, non-communicable disease prevention, mental health treatment, pharmaceutical research development etc.) because donors have other issues (and more often specific diseases or issues) that they care about.
The impact of this is all too clear to see. Development when funded by aid and Charity is done to us rather than by us. And, when problems that are not a priority for donors, like a global pandemic, come to the fore we find ourselves without the capacity to properly deal with them.
Conclusion – taking back our agency
After its independence in 1947, India made a very deliberate choice, facing serious health challenges among its large population, one of the critical things that India needed to vaccinate millions of people against TB, Smallpox, Polio, and other infectious diseases. However, at the time, much like Africa today, India was reliant on the importation of often expensive pharmaceuticals and biomedicals. The Indian government very deliberately set about investing in indigenous pharmaceutical companies, enabling them to build up R&D capabilities and most importantly the capability to produce pharmaceuticals in India. By the 1990s when India’s economy was being opened up these companies combined rapid growth in their own large domestic markets with global partnerships and continued investment and supportive policy from the government to become global players. The greatest example of this is the Serum Institute of India (SII), set up in 1966 to produce immunobiological’s, it was a beneficiary of the Indian government’s policy and today is the largest vaccine producer in the world. The majority of the Covid vaccines delivered to Africa are made by the SII.
Doing away with charity as policy means taking a lesson from India’s book. Making, deliberate choices to invest in areas that will wean us off dependence. It may take us 20 years to build up the infrastructure to produce our own vaccines, but it will mean that the health of our people will no longer be reliant on whatever others have to spare to deploy programs like COVAX or GAVI.
This thinking isn’t just limited to the health sector but will require us to make very deliberate choices and investments in the design and deployment of our education systems, climate policy, food security, transport, and science and technology. Not just for jingoistic, populist reasons that sound good on the campaign trail, but to free critical aspects of our development from whims of charity and geopolitics and put them in the hands of Africans. If we do not, when the next crisis rolls around, Africa will once again find itself left behind, begging bowl held out dependent on the charity of others.