Aid and Other Dirty Business: How Good Intentions Have Failed the World's Poor by Giles Bolton

Author:Giles Bolton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407023045
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

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Ambassador, you spoil us

An even higher proportion of Rwandans – nearly 90 per cent – work in agriculture than in almost any other African country. A year into the job, I realised I hadn’t been out enough into the countryside to see what rural life was really like, instead of visiting offices and reading reports about it. So I tagged onto a group for a day that was mapping parts of the country particularly vulnerable to food shortages and malnutrition.

This may sound crude, but it never fails to astonish how poor some people can be. During the day we visited a few homes that were unlike anything I’d seen outside refugee camps. Despite being in their own villages, these people had all but no possessions. Houses of damp mud walls with nothing to decorate them. A broken door that never shuts and no money to buy nails. Two sets of clothes if they were lucky – both so threadbare that the basic function of covering up intimate parts was not always met. No shoes. One cracked plastic bowl for a family. Ill health writ large on craggy faces and cramped bodies.

I had to leave the group early to return to the National Day celebrations at one of the large European embassies. Two hours after driving out of the villages I was in line with numerous dignitaries on a red carpet about to be greeted by the Ambassador and military attaché (in full uniform). The contrast felt as big as they come.

The people I had met that morning and afternoon did not earn the price of one soda in a day. Now it was cocktails and canapés with diplomats and ministers on the lawn. Though I had originally dreaded having to attend evening receptions when I started my job in Rwanda, I found there were usually enough interesting people to make them manageable. But on this occasion the cast list of my colleague representatives from Western countries left me feeling less smooth in my small talk than usual.

Just as with consultants and aid workers staying in luxury hotels, there’s little intrinsically wrong with Westerners holding swish parties in poor countries. Why shouldn’t they? It is, after all, what their countrymen do back home, and our own societies are awash with conspicuous displays of disposable consumption. You could even argue such events help bring money into poor economies. It’s the policies of the countries Western diplomats and aid workers represent that are the real awkwardness.

Ending or amending the West’s agricultural subsidies would not directly help the poorest of the poor in Africa – they live almost entirely outside the market altogether. But if their countries as a whole began to take off, they would eventually gain too. And if a serious aid effort meant that children received free basic healthcare and schooling in the meantime, there’s a good chance the next generation will not have to cope with so extraordinarily little while they wait for economic opportunity finally to arrive.

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