Developmental aid for Africa from the West has long been of questionable efficacy; to cut a long story short this aid has so often encouraged unhealthy dependency. See for example this article on Spiegel Online:
See also the accompanying Photo Album:
Christian Mission has faced similar problems of unintentionally promoting African dependency on handouts.. Christian Missionary and Anthropologist Dr Jim Harries lives in Kenya and has spent much time pondering and writing about these problems. He is heading up the UK April 2015 conferences advertised here. Jim promotes a method of Christian Mission that uses local languages and local resources, without the potentially destabilizing effects of Western resources. Moreover, the use of local languages challenges missionaries to gain a deep understanding of the local culture and with it comes a much greater chance of reading the subtexts that tell us about the why's and wherefore's of Western project failures in Africa.
I may be presenting a paper at one of the conferences. If I do here is the abstract:
De-polarising the
dependency vs. independency dichotomy
What is at the bottom of the frequent failure of African development and
Christian mission projects, projects prompted and assisted by Western
Civilisation? What prevents Western ways seamlessly grafting on to
the African context? This paper probes both the rural African and
Western cultural mind sets and discovers incommensurability between the two.
This incommensurability is very apparent in contrasting views about the source
of “fortune”; that is, the hidden engine which drives
everyday events. Differences in the understanding of the nature of
this engine lead to very different perspectives: On the one hand the
rural African has little inhibition about having a resource dependent identity
but the downside of this is that it can compromise proactivity and
responsibility. On the other hand the Westerner who feels he comprehensively
grasps the underlying mechanisms that drive the cosmos may all too readily be
prey to an unhealthy control freakery and an independence of the divine. Both
perspectives have positives and negatives and constitute a thesis-antithesis
pair crying out for synthesis. This current paper, which grew out of a discussion document co-authored with Jim Harries , seeks
a path between irresponsible dependency and the proud self-sufficiency of
independency.
As the flint of Western thought grinds
against the frizzen of Africa sparks are being produced igniting the fires of
many fruitful discussions about African development. These discussions in turn
could help address the problematical philosophical nihilism which so easily
grows out of purely secular thinking thereby plaguing Western societies with
deep existential crises.
SEE HERE FOR THE PAPER I PRESENTED:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeNXFGZDQwcWs2WVk/view
(See also: http://www.vulnerablemission.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/OB_Spring_2014.pdf)
SEE HERE FOR THE PAPER I PRESENTED:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeNXFGZDQwcWs2WVk/view
(See also: http://www.vulnerablemission.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/OB_Spring_2014.pdf)
Spiegel says: Ideally, foreign aid should not offer anything that locals cannot do themselves. Expertise can be helpful, as here in Adama, Ethiopia. But foreign aid workers should not get in the way of local initiative.
Spiegel says: Many well known stars, such as Bob Geldof, have become heavily involved in African aid. But some say that we need to get away from the idea the more money necessarily means more help.
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