Reforming Foreign Aid(s): A modest proposal

By Vivek Krishnamurthy

Most of us know something of the terrible toll that HIV/AIDS is exacting in much of the developing world, but few people are able to bring the magnitude of the suffering and the upheaval this modern-day plague is causing with the passion and conviction of Stephen Lewis, the current UN Special Representative for HIV/AIDS in Sub-Sahara Africa. I had the privilege of hearing Mr. Lewis speak in New Haven yesterday, though the picture he paints is bleak: people struck down in the prime of their lives, orphan children left to fend for themselves, and the real possibility that certain southern African countries may simply be wiped off the map by the disease.

For a former diplomat, and a Canadian diplomat at that, Lewis is surprisingly blunt in denouncing the West's failure to do something to combat the AIDS crisis as "criminal negligence" that ought to be actionable before the International Criminal Court. We in the West have all the resources at our disposal to prevent tens of millions from dying premature deaths due to AIDS if we only made anti-retroviral drugs and basic medical care more widely available in the countries worst affected by the pandemic, and yet we choose not to do so. While Lewis's talk never really addressed why we are so torpid in our response to AIDS in Africa, his presentation did give me an idea on how we might want to go about changing things.

"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," said Joseph Stalin once, and for most of us AIDS, poverty, and hunger in the developing world are merely that: statistics we barely comprehend, let alone feel empowered to change. When confronted by such astronomical numbers, we are so overwhelmed that we simply throw up our hands and turn our backs to the suffering behind those numbers. Meanwhile, the efforts of official government foreign aid programs to put a dent in those numbers usually gets hoisted on its own numerical petard, as an uncomprehending public questions spending billions on programs that seem to make no difference to the problem. In the meanwhile, donor fatigue sets in, political will gets lost, and no progress is made.

If the problem with foreign aid is that it's too abstract and impersonal for people to understand, surely the solution must be to make it concrete and personal, so that people can grasp the difference that their contributions mek. That's why my modest proposal for reforming foreign aid is to replace the scattershot approach of the big government aid agencies (like USAID and CIDA) with a new program of "twinning," whereby every developed country would be twinned with one, two, or three developing countries, and would bear the full responsibility for lifting its twins out of poverty. Instead of a single specialized agency being responsible for foreign aid and development, it would be the responsibility of the whole society to help its twins out of poverty.

Government departments would be twinned with their counterparts in the developing country, as would schools, hospitals, universities, service organizations, faith groups, and even sports teams. Each would provide direct assistance in its area of expertise to its analogues in the twinned country, and each might even be charged with making sure that together with its twin, certain development goals are reached within a certain time.

In forging such close and personal connections between every tier of the donor society, and the recipients of their assistance in the developing country, political support for foreign aid would rest on a much more solid basis. Instead of being presented with a barrage of numbers, people in the industrialized world would be relating to real human brings whom they will be responsible for helping in very real and tangible ways. Piercing the veil of anonymity that shrouds the current foreign aid system would lead to schoolchildren, bureaucrats, business people, and church-goers feeling a sense of responsibility for their twins overseas, which I think would be powerful in shaking people out of their current apathy. Moreover, allocating responsibility in this way enhances accountability for when promises are not kept, and goals are not met; for unlike in the current system, there will be no statistics behind which people (and governments) can hide when they fail to own up to their historic duties.

The challenge, of course, would be to convince a country to abandon the old approach in favour of this radical new way of delivering development assistance. This will not be an easy task, given the strong constituencies backing the current order, but one of the virtues of this approach is that it empowers ordinary people to take the lead in advancing development. If each of us were to get an institution to which we belong to select a counterpart in the developing world that could benefit from our expertise, we would have made a very good start to delivering aid in a better way.

(Cross-posted at the Dominion Wine and Cheese Society.)