Foreign Aid to Africa: A Hollow Hope

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge in calls for more foreign aid to Africa in order to eliminate the continent’s poverty. International organizations, scholars, celebrities, and philanthropists have all made renewed pleas for a massive infusion of development aid. They generally present two arguments to justify more foreign aid to Africa. One family of justificatory arguments aims to establish the essential rightness of foreign aid and the West’s moral obligation to provide it: Helping Africa through foreign aid is not only charitable but morally correct, and repairs the conditions of injustice and inequality that permeate the international political economy. Redolent of the familiar “white man’s burden” to uplift the peoples of the “dark continent” from gloom, ignorance, and despondency, this justification derives force from its missionary zeal.1 Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s memorable description of the continent as a “scar on the conscience of the world,” as well as his insistence that the international commu-

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