Development aid critique: quick results say little about long-term success

Brigitte Erler’s Tödliche Hilfe (Deadly Aid) was published in 1985 and unleashed a furious public and academic discussion in Germany about the value of development assistance. The book was a forerunner of a debate about aid effectiveness that continues unabated today and has led, among other things, to an emphasis on quick, measureable impacts in the design of development projects. However, quick results say little about the ultimate contribution of such projects. Revisiting some of the projects Erler criticized, now, thirty year later, sheds surprising light on the subject. by Marianne Scholte

In 1983, Erler, then a desk officer in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), returned from a three-week trip to Bangladesh, where she visited projects supported by the ministry. She immediately quit her job and wrote Tödliche Hilfe, in which she maintained that ‘every single component of the projects implemented under my responsibility made the rich richer and the poor, poorer.’

Erler was one of the first to write a scathing bestseller critical of development aid. She would not be the last. In 2009, the Zambian economist, Dambisa Moyo, wrote a book with a title similar to Erler’s: Dead Aid: why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa. Echoing Erler, Moyo claimed that ‘Millions in Africa are poorer today because of aid; misery and poverty have not ended but increased.’

In the more nuanced, but no less strident The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006), William Easterly, the former World Bank research economist, argued that aid has been, for the most part, a colossal waste of money because planners had been imposing ‘big ideas’ from above instead of searching out what might work in a concrete situation. 

This fundamental skepticism towards aid has contributed to a questionable trend in international development cooperation: Today, development projects are increasingly required to use relatively short-term results-based monitoring and evaluation frameworks such as DFID’s 3Es ‘Value for Money’ or the BMZ’s Results Matrix to prove that their positive impact justifies the use of development funds. Some agencies are even experimenting with a cash-on-delivery framework, whereby development aid is only disbursed if the planned results have actually been achieved. 

Critics in the tradition of Brigitte Erler have done a disservice to development aid, as they have ignored the fact that one needs patience for development and development aid to be successful. In this context, it is instructive to circle back and examine some of the BMZ-supported projects in Bangladesh that so exasperated Erler 30 years ago.