EMPOWERMENT STARTS WHERE AID STOPS!

In his essay A Few First Principles for a Booming Third Sector, Harvard Business School professor James A. Austin highlights the rapid growth of charitable enterprises across the globe, noting that this sector is expanding faster than both the public and private spheres. Austin underscores its economic weight: in the United States, the nonprofit sector contributes 6.7% of GDP—more than the computer, automobile, and steel industries combined. It mobilises 11.6% of the workforce, amounting to the equivalent of 40% of U.S. manufacturing output. While the United Kingdom’s nonprofit sector is comparatively smaller, Austin points out that it nonetheless demonstrates significant, though unrealised, economic potential (Austin, 2004).

These figures illustrate the magnitude of the aid and nonprofit ecosystem, yet they also raise important questions about the dynamics of power, dependency, and the unintended consequences of aid. My own experience compels me to interrogate whether the aid industry, despite its stated aims, sometimes sustains itself more than it sustains those it purports to serve.

I remain deeply suspicious that poverty, for some, has become a source of professional and financial gain. “Poverty eradication” often appears less like a genuine goal and more like a career trajectory, particularly for bureaucrats in the so-called "First World" who are entrusted with dispensing funds to the Global South. The circulation of aid money provides jobs, maintains institutions, and fuels administrative machinery—sometimes at the expense of addressing the immediate needs of those on the ground.

I recall vividly an encounter in Dar es Salaam in 2000 with a woman named Vero, who was living with HIV. She pleaded with me to share her story with donors in Sweden because she could not access support in Tanzania under the existing rules. To qualify for assistance, she explained, one had to be affiliated with a registered NGO and agree to publicly disclose one’s HIV status. For her, this was not only humiliating but also practically impossible. Yet many, out of sheer necessity, submitted to these regulations. It is precisely this environment that has led to the proliferation of so-called “MONGOs”—My Own NGOs. MONGOs often exist simply as vehicles to channel funding from larger international organizations. However, in order to survive, they must replicate the very bureaucratic requirements of their donors—reporting, monitoring, evaluating—thus perpetuating an administrative cycle that absorbs resources without necessarily empowering those in need. In the context of HIV/AIDS, the trajectory of donor money has been, at best, convoluted, and at worst, counterproductive.

This personal encounter with Vero shaped my broader conviction: that long-term socio-economic empowerment in Africa cannot be externally engineered. The billions of dollars that have been poured into the continent over decades have yielded disappointingly little in terms of sustainable transformation. I concur with many aid critics that Africa is no longer—if it ever truly was—“the white man’s burden.” Genuine empowerment will emerge from within Africa itself, for only those who wear the shoe can truly know where it pinches.

Aid, in its current structure, often sustains systems of dependency and preserves the status of “career philanthropists,” whose relevance would diminish if genuine empowerment were achieved. Poverty, paradoxically, sustains livelihoods for some, even as it devastates others.
True empowerment, therefore, will begin not where aid is expanded, but precisely where aid stops—when Africans harness their own agency, define their own trajectories of development, and refuse to conflate charity with transformation.