THE ROLE OF FOREIGN AID IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: A CASE STUDY OF KENYA

Abstract

This thesis discusses the role of foreign aid in Sub Saharan Africa. Foreign aid or Official \ndevelopment aid as a came up in 1945 and was adopted by the United Nations as a measure \ngeared towards promotion of social progress and better standards of life. Foreign aid is of \nparticular importance to Africa’s human development programme. The hypothesis states that \nforeign aid has had a positive impact on Sub-Saharan Africa’s development Agenda and that \npoor policy environment in Sub-Saharan Africa has been a cause of ineffective application of \nforeign aid. The thesis uses Kenya as a case study and notes that foreign aid to Kenya is policy \nbased with donors supporting Kenya’s development strategies which are tied around sectoral \nreforms and the Vision 2030. The economic rationale for aid is based on the claim that the \nmacroeconomic contribution of aid to recipient countries is positive through the promotion of \nimproved economic policies and resource allocation. Africa is aid dependent, not only in terms \nof the quantity of aid but in terms of the institutional mechanisms of this aid flow. Foreign aid \nhas caused all manner of debate in the study of international relations. There are scholars who \nare for foreign aid and those who are against foreign aid. Pro-aid scholars feel that aid helps \ndeveloping countries’ economies and also helps improve human development especially in \ncountries with sound political and economic policies. Scholars against aid state that aid creates a \n“moral hazard” problem (Samaritans dilemma), meaning that governments can spend money \nwithout a firm budget constraint, confident that donors will bail them out of any difficulty. \nDonors, who want to help (or are committed to send money for other reasons), may be forced to \noblige. This group of scholars also feel that by paying big salary premiums, large donor projects \ncan “poach” good people away from government, weakening its institutions and that recipients \ngovernments overstretch themselves and in situations where focusing on priorities is important, \nrecipients will often prefer to expand their operations to cover whatever projects donors wish to \nfund, especially since such funding often creates perks for officials.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.