Africa Must Respond Credibly to Trump’s Demolition of the United States Aid Model

On January 20, two executive orders announced a realignment of US foreign development cooperation in line with the Administration’s “America First” principles.

A week later, USAID, the jewel in the crown of Washington’s international development system, was marked for complete dismantling. Elon Musk told the world that he and his team at Washington’s Department for Government Efficiency had spent the weekend feeding USAID into the ‘woodchipper’. Only about 5% of its staff stay on.

Pandemonium broke out in the aid world. The US accounts for roughly 42% of global humanitarian spending. In some areas such as HIV-AIDs prevention and treatment, its $5.4bn (2024) in annual spending (97% for overseas programs) is over 25% of the global budget.

About 30 million people benefit from this. Aid and advocacy saw prices of HIV drugs fall from $14,000 per patient per year in 1990 to $96 today.

In the midst of fears about a humanitarian carnage we must find the courage to address the structural mess that the western-dominated aid system faces. Much of this predates Trump and will continue after he leaves the scene.

Instead of discussing how to reform the current aid system, a group of “pragmatists” is asking us to embrace a “multipolar” regime in which finance-needy countries and finance-supplying countries can all choose to maximise their national transactional interests. I find that naïve.

The rising geo-economic powers – the BRICS and the Gulf states – have no interest in the classical aid paradigm.

Trump, Musk, and Rubio are no innovators. Their push to align aid explicitly with US foreign policy goals is a desperate scramble to catch up with China, the United Arab Emirates and Singapore.

In those countries, there has never been a debate about whether international development cooperation should serve as an extension of foreign policy. Everyone assumes so. Even the UK aid reforms of 2020 that fused the DFID into the foreign office hinted at this.

End of the classical aid paradigm

As the world’s economic centre gravity shifts east, most finance for development will flow from countries with no loyalty to the classical aid paradigm.

Singapore is three times richer than Greece and twice as rich than Denmark in per capita terms. While Singapore may purport to invest in international cooperation, its focuses on expanding its “external economy” on transactional grounds – more than a multilateralism and UN Sustainable Development Goals paradigm.

The UAE, which is twice as rich as Greece, does the same. As also does the Chinese development cooperation system as guided by the State Council. Yet Greece follows the classical aid paradigm and the European Union-centric Brussels norms, and it spends most of its meagre foreign aid through the multilateral system.

If the world is going multipolar, the future of government aid is towards the Chinese, UAE and Singaporean models. This spells doom for Europe’s classical paradigm. Countries loyal to the classical norms are poorer than those that ignore them such as the UAE.

These rising economic powers are under no obligation to save the old system. That China will somehow pick the tabs for anti-retrovirals is a prayer I hear on some parts of social media. It won’t.

Others argue that if we shift from a classical aid to a more multi-polar development system, this will drive more finance to infrastructure and stimulate growth in poor countries. Then today’s aid-recipient countries will pick up the tabs for their own anti-retrovirals, school meals, and women in corporate boardroom campaigns.

Governance issues in the development arena

This is where the pragmatists become utopian. They underestimate the governance issues in the development arena.

In Ghana, the government awarded a contract without a competitive tender to a Chinese company to build a major dam in the north-eastern town of Pwalugu, hoping that development funds would follow.

Five years on, after $12 million in advance payments (and a further $12m in debt) to the contractor, the site has been abandoned with zero percent of the dam built.

Why? Because poor project design, lack of bankability, and ineffectual monitoring were exacerbated by the opacity of this new form of development cooperation. Governance safeguards of the classical aid paradigm – such as transparency and accountability – were dispensed with.

The end of the multilateral era?

Multilateralism in aid is declining fast. In 2021, there were 565 major global actors in development cooperation; almost triple the number in 2000.

Their areas of focus have multiplied. In 2019, there were nearly 223,000 transactions across manifold focus areas. When scholars model the interactions among aid actors, countries, and focus areas, the resulting network has billions of nodes.

The multilateral system is sagging under its own weight and is bewildered by its own complexity and lack of coordination. The duplications and wastage will worsen in the chase for contracts and the plying of unscrupulous politicians with kickbacks.

Better coordination will not come by ignoring the clear, if hard to enforce, norms of the classical aid paradigm as enshrined in the Paris and Addis Ababa frameworks. But the new rich players shown little interest in these.

The loudest cries against the Trump-Rubio-Musk attacks on aid budgets have not been from civil communities within recipient countries. Almost all the protests have emanated from the US and Europe.

This is because the classical aid paradigm has failed to live up to its own norms of accountability to domestic civil society.

In thrall to elite insiders

For far too long the classical aid program was in thrall to elite insiders. In the two decades that I have been a development activist, I never penetrated the system’s arcaneness. Less activist citizens barely had a look in. So, many accept the frightening accounts of USAID’s complicity in evil being painted across social media.

The classical paradigm has fallen short of its glory. But I question the redemptive quality of its replacements. Today, it is impossible to track the aid programme, for example, of India in an African country.

I have spent two years trying to unravel a case where a state-backed gold refinery supposedly funded by the government of India in Ghana has mysteriously been assigned to untraceable private investors. Nobody will say anything no matter how much I pry. Yet the refinery, like a sugar factory also funded by India, remains idle. Major gold mines are avoiding it because of the shadiness.

A world in which development cooperation projects aren’t subject to multilateral governance criteria or coordinated across funders would not be one where development funds are spent more efficiently.

Country-level actors must be responsible for scrutinising development spending to ensure coordination, prioritisation, and eliminate waste. Merely cheering on the possible emergence of a new, post-imperial, agency-driven, multi-polar aid system won’t help our countries.

The classical aid system is tottering. But it is naïve to think that its fall would be pretty, or that its replacements would be more effective.