Credibility of Development Aid and the lessons from Rwanda

Essay from the year 2011 in the subject Politics - Region: Africa, grade: Keine, University of East London (Royal Docks Business School), language: English, abstract: Development Aid has gained its popularity since the end of World War II. The first official development Aid, the Marshall Plan was a successful model that rebuilt devastated Europe. Aids, for third world development however, could not prove its outcome. Four decades after the beginning of development aid, Africa is poorer than fourty years ago, claims Dambisa Moyo, a prominent American educated scholor and development policy expert. Despite the flow of billions of dollors in African economies, they are more dependent today than ever before. She claims that Aid made Africans lazy. They see it as a regular income and do not try to build their nation themselves. This has a huge impact in the future of Africa. She believes that the donor countries should stop the flow of aid, as it never reaches the ones who really need it. Other prominent development aid experts however doubt this argument because this could mean millions of deaths in short term. However, we can conclude that the way how development aid functions today could be organized in a better way so that it will be more effective. The role of transnational agencies like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) should be reformed. The pre-conditions for short term and long term loans should not be made dependent on market liberalisation or opening the third world markets. Rwanda, a country that experienced the horrors of one of the most terrible genocide in human history, when the Hutu Militants killed almost one million Tutsis within few months, is one of the most stable countries in Africa today. Its economy is booming, it has an excellent security system. Rwanda did not get Aid from third countries for years. It fought itself to come out of the nightmares of Genocide and built a stable economy, without aid. Today, Africans learn from Rwanda. They have understood that life is possible without aid and the first step to that is being independent from any foreign assistence. Rwanda presented itself as a role model in Africa that some development aid experts started to believe that aid should be given but there should be a time frame. The Marshall Plan in Western Europe had a time frame, after few years, aid flow stopped and the Europeans had to pay back the money. Same model would be plausible for Africa and all the receivers of development aid. They should know that aid is not for always, it is just a help to selfhelp.