"Africans only Accept Aid if they are Involved in the Process"

You might think that locals on the ground await an aid convoy with the same shining-faced excitement that children await Santa Claus - but they don't, as Paul Nyamodi writes from Kenya

"This is what it's like to be on the ground here in Kenya when an aid convoy arrives. There's a tremendous commotion, as if the Messiah himself has descended. Aid workers converge on a small village in gleaming all-terrain Jeeps, wearing dark glasses and broad-brimmed hats to keep out the sun. The local people are getting used to these displays by now, and know the drill. Answer the white man's questions right, they reckon, and the aid money will flow their way.

You might imagine that the villagers would anticipate the aid convoy with the same shining-faced excitement that children await Santa Claus. But the honest truth is, they don't. The experience of being a recipient of donor aid is not nearly so rewarding as the international aid organisations seem to think.
A common sight in refugee camps is a white man or woman marching around with food, shoes and blankets and inspecting people and saying, "We think you need a blanket. Here! A blanket for you." I'm not saying that the person did not need a blanket - a cold person always welcomes a blanket, a hungry person wants food, someone who is barefoot will never say no to shoes. But it seems to me that the aid agencies are not willing to discuss, with those in need, what their priorities are. They want to prescribe them. A refugee's most pressing requirements may not be so simple and immediately obvious as shoes, blankets, food, but even more important to that person in need. They do not want to believe that the local people have a vital role to play.

This lack of consultation from the top down seems to afflict every action the aid agencies undertake.

Grasping Basic Facts

The international aid organisation, with no doubt the best intentions, still fail to grasp one very basic fact of life about Africa. It is that Africans will not accept aid gratefully and put it to its best use unless they feel they've been involved in every stage of the process. For example, let us say that an international aid organisation has decided that what a village really needs is a new cattle dip. They go ahead and construct a new cattle dip for the village, using the best expertise available. The fact is that unless the NGO has first consulted the villagers as to where they want the cattle dip what design they want what materials they want used and who is going to being charge of running the cattle dip, the village will probably tear it down the moment the aid convoy has left town.

But aid recipients in Africa are pretty clear on one point. The arrival of the convoy signals that at some point, somewhere, deals have been struck, and trade-offs made - either between governments or between donor agencies. They also know that they have not been consulted at a local level. So the locals - those right at the end of the aid chain - feel they have most often been kept completely in the dark about what is going on. This brings problems in its wake, especially in Africa.

Take a local health clinic I run in Kenya. Suddenly, without any warning, Médecins Sans Frontières (Spanish Operation) erected a clinic just a few hundred metres from an existing clinic, simply because they hadn't bothered to consult locally. If they had, I could have told them that my Youth Development Group (YDG) already has a clinic a short distance away, but that a new clinic was desperately needed several kilometres down the road.

When people in Kenya's poorest regions or shanty towns see an aid convoy, dollar signs almost literally flash up in their eyes. Sometimes, the presence of aid agencies handing out work contracts can change for ever the way locals regard "charity work". YDG started a project with MSF (Spain), and had a lot of money for a while, which they splashed about the local community. During this time, a local priest managed to build from scratch a whole church, which was used by the entire community for several years to pray in. After a time, the roof started to leak and the priest decided to renovate. He asked his parishioners to help him, but they refused. They would only do it for money. Before the aid money came, they would have done it for nothing.

Problem of Racism

Racism, too, remains a deep-seated problem. The international aid agencies often show a reluctance to appoint locals to managerial positions. In my work with the African Medical Research Foundation (AMRF), I had a Canadian boss. There were some African directors, but whenever it came to taking big decisions, it was the international aid workers who took them. I think it will be still many years before we see a black Director General of AMRF.

This reluctance on the part of the donors is, I think, self defeating. I find myself starting to ask questions about why aid agencies should want to give the impression that they have come to help when they are, in fact, creating a situation through these hiring policies that will leed to their staying on much longer than was originally thought necessary. If they made more of an effort to invest in the local people, this wouldn't be the case.

Humanitarian aid would often be much more effective if we locals were given the opportunity to decide and advise on the needs of the people. Where humanitarian aid really fails is when the NGOs use aid as job-creation schemes for students on their years-off or young graduates keen to gain experience of the "Third-World".

Incompetence and Unfairness

This can lead to extremely embarrassing instances of incompetence and unfairness. For two years, my YDG project survived on its own resources without a reliable project donor. Then I discovered that one expatriate nurse (whose CV showed she did not have enough work experience under her belt to head up such a project) earned a salary big enough to pay for seven local nurses of her calibre. Somehow, this "super-nurse" managed to squeeze enough out of her salary and expenses to visit some of Kenya's major tourist resorts.

International aid groups and NGOs must realize that it is much less easy than in books to penetrate down to the grassroots. Money alone is not enough. Organisations must take on board that there is an inherent colonial suspicion among Africans, a reflex that will take tremendous efforts on the part of donors to shift. And it also means that when a white man tells them to do something, they may say "yes Boss," but they will not actually do it unless they have the say-so from one of their black brothers or sisters."

Paul Nyamodi runs a local healthcare clinic in Kibera, one of the biggest slums in Kenya. He is the founder-director of the Youth Development Group, holds a degree in international relations and is a political leader.