In 2005, Gordon Brown, British chancellor of the exchequer, later prime minister, was in Washington, seeking to raise $50 billion annually in additional international aid for Africa.
I hosted a press event for Brown at the National Press Club, and I asked him how all this money would get to the people who needed it?
“We’ll give it to the right people,” he said crossly.
I told him I had seen foreign aid stolen, diverted and spent by the agencies that were supposed to deliver it on pet projects and themselves.
But there is another way, and it is working in the small, peaceful and democratic Southern African country of Malawi.
An organization called GiveDirectly has been handing $550 to every adult — men and women — in villages with no strings attached. It is estimated that for every $1,000 disbursed, there is an economic impact of $2,400.
This differs radically from foreign aid that has poured into sub-Saharan Africa since the end of colonial rule. Normally, this is passed on to a local government agency or a non-governmental organization and has been earmarked for a school, a hospital, water supply or famine relief. Often, this has led to bureaucratic delays and high overhead costs.
The aid organizations, mostly from North America and Europe, haven’t always earned plaudits. I have heard them described as “cheap tourists” and worse.
Another source of friction has been the tendency of aid workers to impose their values on recipients — for example, promoting green technologies or Western dietary preferences.
“We are flipping the traditional aid logic on its head. Rather than us figuring out what people need and having a kind of one-size-fits-all approach, we are saying people are the best placed to say what they need and what will be best for their circumstances,” Grace Jackson, GiveDirectly country director for Malawi, told me and my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell III, on the television program “White House Chronicle.”
“What we can do is to provide the tools, i.e. cash, so they can go ahead and do what is the most important and most useful to them,” she added.
Everyone over the age of 18 in a village gets the money delivered via a phone wallet, and if the villager doesn’t have a phone, Jackson said GiveDirectly provides one.
They also make sure there is a viable local financial entity with enough money on hand to pay out as villagers require it.
I believe this approach works well because of the nature of subsistence life in rural Africa, typified by village life in Malawi. It is wrong to think of poverty in the African countryside, and it is extreme, the way we think of urban poverty in America.
Rural people in Malawi — and a majority of its 22 million people are rural — simply have nothing. I repeat, nothing. They have few clothes, no shoes and no food security.
They survive by subsistence farming, mostly growing corn, which, with an occasional protein, is their diet. They have to eat all year on what they grow.
Yet families hold together as do the villages. Often, grown children live with their parents and help with the farming, generally done with simple hand tools. In the nothingness there is order.
The Malawi experiment is working, lifting whole villages above the international poverty line. Jackson, who is English, said the money was used in various ways. People bought more land, got medical attention, paid school fees or pooled the money for big things like electrification.
Recently, the program has received a $150 million boost from the Canva Foundation, the charity established by billionaires Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, co-founders of Canva, a popular graphic design tool.
GiveDirectly was created by MIT and Harvard students as a giving circle, based on their studies of the efficacy of charity programs. It was formalized in 2012. The organization hasn’t just helped the needy overseas, it has also handed out aid in the form of debit cards to U.S. disaster survivors.
The idea of letting the recipients of the aid decide how to spend it may appeal to conservatives and incline them more favorably toward foreign aid, especially if it is entirely derived from the private sector.
By the way, Gordon Brown’s grand scheme never got off the ground.