Lessons in foreign aid from a trip to Uganda

When President Trump and Elon Mask brought the shutters down on USAID, I was reminded of things I had seen and heard in Uganda last month while conducting development research there — things that should make us rethink stereotypes about foreign aid and its effectiveness.

Trump is liked among the poor of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. The influence of evangelical Christian groups in Uganda, mostly American, led to draconian legal measures being enacted against the country’s gay and transgender populations in May 2023. President Biden responded by cutting off foreign aid to Uganda. The foreign policy measure did not go over well with the conservative religious populations of Uganda, which is 46 percent evangelical, 36 percent Catholic and 14 percent Muslim.

Several people told me they looked forward to President Trump restoring foreign aid. Shop owners in Kampala’s Owino Market spoke in gushing terms about Trump.

Many Ugandans love strong men and authoritarian figures, who are lauded on local radio talk shows. On a trip through downtown Kampala, I saw public minibuses and boda bodas, or motorcycle taxis, with stickers of Putin, Idi Amin and even Hitler.

A trip to Owino Market — bustling with hundreds of low-end shops and eateries that cater to the poor — illuminates the liberal end of generosity. Books donated from the West for African readers find their way here to be sold for recycling and made into paper bags and other products. My local guide, with a graduate degree in sociology, made fun of books he randomly picked up — from old copies of Encyclopedia Britannica to sci-fi books in English — that most poor Ugandans cannot read.

Three miles away, a fancy boutique store recycles clothes donated from the West with stylish refurbishments to turn them into haute couture. The clothing line is called “Return to Sender” and meant for high-end stores in Europe.

Jacqueline Novogratz’s 2009 book “The Blue Sweater” touched many a heart in the West. The author found a young girl in Rwanda wearing a sweater that the author once wore. The book is about our interconnections, but it can equally be read as liberal paternalism. Starting in 2016, the East African Community of eight countries began to ban imports of used clothing.

Foreign aid scholars have stayed mostly silent over the last month. Most of their work has gone into showing how foreign aid is about donor motivations and domestic politics in the U.S. America and other powerful nations often get poorer countries to follow their interests through clever deployments of foreign aid. In these terms, Trump shutting down foreign aid is more of a case of cutting off the nose to spite the face.

There is one thing about which Musk is partially correct: Many aspects of foreign aid amount to corruption, albeit mostly in America. Foreign aid allows American farmers and manufacturers, many of whom vote Republican, to get funds so they can sell their wheat and medicines (if not donated) to be supplied to countries in need. More than 10,000 USAID employees and another 10,000 at USAID’s contracting agencies in the U.S. draw their salaries from the disbursement of foreign aid funds. Chemonics, the biggest USAID grant agency with 5,000 employees, even makes annual profits from foreign aid. A majority of American foreign aid might actually feed Americans.

Early critics of foreign aid from the time USAID was created included the prominent development economist Peter Bauer, who wrote about creating dependencies, corruption and destroying local economies. More recently, Dambisa Moyo in her book “Dead Aid” wrote that millions in Africa are poor because of aid.

Despite these grand critiques, political economists have carefully examined the conditions under which foreign aid can work to improve the lives of the poor. These are the “micro” places to start reforming foreign aid, which are indeed necessary. Instead, Musk turned the debate into a “macro” spectacle of surreal proportions.

There are also parts of foreign aid, especially humanitarian aid, that cushion the effect of the world’s worst diseases, disasters and atrocities. It makes one human being empathize with the conditions of another in a different part of the world. People remember the food they received in refugee camps, or the medicines during a pandemic.

Finally, foreign aid allows one to be a good neighbor. One way to live with our neighbors is to continually yell and scream at them. Another option is to build goodwill. One could send them tiny gifts that may matter more to us than to them but have the appearance of generosity. They are part of countries’ “public diplomacy” to make others do what we want.

In transactional terms, Trump is letting go of an effective instrument to persuade countries into following American interests, or goad them to export precious minerals and primary products. Midwestern wheat and Delaware medicines generate goodwill. China smiles as Trump retreats.

Meanwhile, the average American continues to vastly overcalculate the tiny amount of the U.S. budget devoted to foreign aid, and 60 percent of Americans polled also think foreign aid is wasted on corruption. It raises a question that hasn’t been asked. Who is more corrupt, the donor or the recipient?

J.P. Singh is Distinguished University Professor at George Mason University and Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow with the Robert Bosch Academy (Berlin). He is co-editor-in-chief of Global Perspectives.