On Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa

The publication of Dambisa Moyo’s (2009) Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is A Better Way for Africa, slightly over a decade ago, changed the terms and trajectory of the discourse about aid, its nature, and the role, good or ill, that it has played in Africa’s development or lack thereof since independence. She called for all development aid to Africa to end within five years of the publication of her book. She was not the only one to take a dim view of aid. Yash Tandon (2008), Ending Aid Dependence, also wrote from a perspective of the Left to criticize the aid regime and its impact on development in Africa and the global South, generally. I have brought in the issue of aid because, although T.D. Harper-Shipman does not directly address it, it looms large over her discussion and is referenced several times in the text. The question of development, when it is formulated, as the book does, turns on some of the issues that have been litigated in the criticism of foreign aid and its checkered career in Africa. The very focus of the book on the need to “rethink ownership of development”, it turns out, has to do with what is, has been, and ought to be the role of different dramatis personae in aid discourse and practice, especially donors and recipients, the principal actors therein.

As a result of repeated criticisms that the aid regime routinely supplanted the agency of recipients and had, over time, failed to show any lasting results from decades of aid infusion into the continent, the advent of a new millennium birthed a whole new discourse about aid and a reconfiguration of the framework for giving, administering, and utilizing aid. No doubt, development remained the focus but the conceptual framework and the mechanics of managing the aid regime were altered.

To blunt the criticism but also to take seriously the clamor for greater control over their development programs, efforts were made to change the paradigm. The core of this change was to shift ownership of development away from donors and their auxiliaries—technical experts, civil servants, financial corporations, foundations, civil society organizations, governments—to recipients who themselves are not monolithic—governments, civil society organizations, civil servants, technical experts, and others. This shift was also expected to include the enhancing of the capacity of recipient African governments and others to direct the goal, course, and dimensions of development in their countries. By owning their development, the expectation was that African countries would set the parameters and delimit the boundaries of the discourse and practice of aid-inflected development, going forward.

Harper-Shipman reviews how far along we have come in solving the problem to which the idea of ownership of development was supposed to be the solution. She takes Kenya and Burkina Faso, two countries that share the colonial experience, that being the only thing they share apart from the fact of their shared African location. Even their colonial experiences are dissimilar, Burkina Faso having suffered under the French colonial yoke and Kenya, the British. Of greater importance are the different trajectories of the two countries post-independence. For the greater part of its post-independence history, Burkina Faso was dominated by military rule and regimes that were more state-centric, whether in the era of socialism or of radical populism during the short reign of Thomas Sankara. Its history during the period when the rest of Africa, like other parts of the world, moved away from state ownership to some measure of privatization as marks a capitalist regime, coincides with the period with which this book deals. Kenya, on the other hand, had from independence been clearly on the capitalist path and its reconfiguring of its economy in the era of privatization was not as drastic a change as it was for Burkina Faso. And, of course, Kenya has been spared the scourge of military rule throughout its post-independence history.

The book focuses on how the health sectors in these two countries have fared in recent times within the context of a new aid regime defined by “ownership of development.” My interest in the book is less in its main disciplinary character as a work in political science and more in the cross- and inter-disciplinary interest it holds for those of us in the more theoretical spheres. Specifically, given that the author takes seriously the centrality of conceptualizations and how they help or hinder the attainment of development goals, my interest is in the superb job the book does in showing what otherwise might be touted as an improvement in the development structure to be much less than it appears to be. As Harper-Shipman writes:

This book probes two questions: What is ownership of development, and how do local stakeholders in different African countries define and navigate ownership? I sought to answer these questions in two disparate African countries—Burkina Faso and Kenya. In both countries, I used the health sector as a contextual anchor for exploring how civil society actors, donors, and government officials negotiate and navigate owning development (2019: 3).

One of the more attractive elements of this book for me is its choice of the idea of ownership as its anchor for the discussion of the aid phenomenon in Kenya and Burkina Faso. Ownership is central to the very idea of sovereignty of the countries concerned, to the subjectivity that is presupposed to define citizenship of the respective polities, and the entire business of being the formulator and director of the processes of development. Part of the criticism of the aid regime is that donors often supplant the will of the recipients when it comes to defining what constitutes development, how it is to be realized, and what goals should be in view for the process. The last time that, for the most part, recipients were in similar situations was when they were still chafing under the yoke of colonization and the colonizers delimited the boundaries of life and thought in the dependencies. Independence was supposed to inaugurate an era marked by the regaining of the subjectivity of the colonized and its placement at the center of development activities. This is what ownership is supposed to manifest.

The ownership paradigm is at once an acknowledgment that something was not right with the aid regime and a solution designed to restore ownership to aid recipients. How have things turned out under this new regime? According to Harper-Shipman, not quite well. What she shows in this work is that the possibilities for obfuscation in the discourse of ownership are quite ample because not enough care is taken to realize the complexities involved in the phenomenon of aid giving and receiving. If government is presumed to be “the primary owner of development,” what happens when donors decide that the government is not to be trusted because it is corrupt, unrepresentative, a failure, or simply incapable of discharging its principal functions? As a result of this attitude to the continent’s states during the same period, non-governmental organizations, otherwise called civil society organizations, emerged into prominence as the principal vehicles through which to channel development aid driven by the mistaken belief that self-proclaimed, honest, private proprietors in the business of charity are better alternatives to grasping state institutions. What this did was to complicate the ownership picture in ways that are not always helpful. What, ordinarily, would have been auxiliaries suddenly were thrust into undeserved prominence and status in aid discourse. And this on both sides of the divide: such groups from donor countries became principal channels and the need to find peer outfits in recipient countries led to similar emergences in them.

Harper-Shipman’s discussion is very helpful in this respect.

As I noted previously, ownership as a paradigm identifies the necessary development actors and their roles in bringing about development. These actors are referred to as stakeholders—the social, political, and economic groups that have a vested interest in national development. Many of these actors can be grouped into categories based on their ability to shape and direct policies. Governments, donors, and civil society organizations (CSOs) are the three primary stakeholders that I examine in the Kenyan and Burkinabe health sectors (2019: 9).

It is one of the strengths of this book that Harper-Shipman’s research led her to the conclusion that when all is said and done, the change from the “donor-recipient” dyad model to regarding everyone in the process as “development partners” may not have moved the dial one bit. This is something that I can relate to given my own thinking that what is all too often forgotten or, if remembered, ignored, is that, as we say in my original language, Yorùbá, sharing is no fun if some participants have nothing to bring to the party. As she clearly shows in the respective chapters on Kenya and Burkina Faso, neither the state institutions in the two countries nor their civil society components can lay claim to the kind of knowledge base—theories, databases, technical know-how—that are requisite to talk plausibly of owning programs and projects that require exactly what we just iterated. How then can we speak of things having changed?

Of equal importance is Harper-Shipman’s choice of the health sector. Good health is central to the very integrity of the self and, hence, of the community within which development is designed to take place and whose welfare is the object of such development, however conceived. We also know that the health sector in various parts of Africa is, for the most part, chronically underdeveloped and the health indices for the population are routinely some of the lowest anywhere in the world. Simultaneously, an unhealthy population cannot but be inimical to the realization of development when it comes to productivity in all sectors of the economy. Finally, notwithstanding the physiological dimensions of health and its manifestations, it is doubtless that a lot of the ways in which we process and experience ill-health is culture-bound. One must not, therefore, deign to discuss the issue of health without paying serious attention to the discourse around it, especially in local registers. But these registers have become imbricated in new discourses and practices that do not easily answer to local idioms. It is part of the book’s argument that the local elements that had formed the core of the discourse had been too few relative to the complexity of the reality that is being explained.

We find from the book that the expectation that reinventing the ownership paradigm would change the terms of engagement—donor-recipient relationship, choice of what projects to prioritize, who directs their execution, how funds are dispensed, and who is accountable for what—has not been realized. Harper-Shipman’s empirical work, the interviews with her primary informants, perusal of policy papers, work relations between “development partners,” and so on, all led her to conclude that the promise of change in the aid and development industry may have been oversold. And it does not matter much what orientation each country she studies brings to the arrangements, what happens is that such are the knowledge deficits the African “partners” bring to the table that their ability to “own” the discourse and the programs is massively truncated.