What’s the point of foreign aid?

Geneva has been doing an awful lot of soul searching recently.

The increasing demands on humanitarian agencies, combined with brutal cuts to their funding, have meant some really challenging decisions. What programmes to cut? What staff to lose? What offices to close? Could a relocation away from Geneva save money?

I had the privilege of discussing all this with an amazing panel of experts recently, when we recorded a live episode of Inside Geneva at Geneva’s Graduate Institute. Our provocative question: “what is the point of foreign aid?”.

To try to answer that we invited Chris Lockyear, until March of this year secretary general of Medecins sans Frontieres, and now a fellow at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, Deike Potzel, the European Union’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, the Graduate Institute’s Professor Gilles Carbonnier, until April vice-president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Jaclyn Lee, graduate student in international development at the Institute.

Please listen to this week’s podcast:

We began with some stark figures; the United Nations estimates that 239 million people worldwide need humanitarian assistance this year. The UN’s plan for 2026 is to help 87 million of them. Some call that careful, efficient targeting of those most in need. Others suggest it is taking food from the mouths of the desperately hungry, to feed those dying of starvation.

Meanwhile conflicts around the worldwide are proliferating, there are currently more than 100. The number of people displaced has doubled in just ten years, to 117 million.

Waste of money?

With so much going wrong in the world, despite the billions spent on foreign aid, Carbonnier says it is understandable that traditional donor countries are asking if this is really a good investment. “What’s the point of mobilising taxpayers’ money, and sending it to far away countries to assist vulnerable people? And how do you sell that to your own taxpayers?”

As Jaclyn Lee pointed out, millions of people in wealthier countries are facing their own financial challenges, and their governments, often with one eye on future elections, fear foreign aid is hardly a vote winner. “A lot of people don’t understand what foreign aid is needed for,” she told us. “Where it goes, how it works. They kind of look at their own situation and say well maybe economically I’m not doing well.”

But concluding that because humanitarian needs are rising, foreign aid is a waste of money, may be the wrong way of looking at it. For years aid agencies have argued that they are being asked to be permanent sticking plasters on the gaping wounds of conflicts that diplomacy and political will should have resolved.

Lockyear reminded us that military spending far exceeds spending on humanitarian aid, and that just a fraction of that is invested in peace mediation and conflict resolution. So we are spending a lot starting and waging wars, then spending a bit more trying to alleviate the suffering those wars cause, but investing almost nothing in bringing those conflicts to an end.

Lockyear also lamented the current inward looking trend in some traditional donor countries, in which many voters seem unwilling to show solidarity with others in less fortunate situations. “If a child is in pain in Khartoum, that’s exactly the same as a child being in pain in New York or London” he said. “If a mother is grieving in Gaza, that’s exactly the same as a mother grieving in Geneva.”

More efficiency, less duplication

But our podcast guests did agree the humanitarian system could be improved. “There is a lot of duplication, and there is also a lot of financial waste in the system. That needs to be cut down,” ambassador Potzel told us. She also warned aid agencies against believing their presence in a particular country was somehow permanent. “The mindset should be, I want to reach a state where I’m not needed. Rather than I need to make sure I get money to be everywhere.”

But Carbonnier pushed back on that last point. “In an ideal world we would love to have the ICRC leaving the Yemens of this world,” he said. “We’ve been there for way too long. But the fact of the matter is there is no way.”

And Lockyear, while not disputing that efficiencies were possible, warned against assuming a cheaper option was always better. “I think you will fall into the trap of somebody saying I can do it cheaper, I can do it better, and we get into this efficiency paradox.”

And the point is?

A key argument in favour of foreign aid, which all our guests made, was that it contributes to global peace and stability, even when the other part of the equation – conflict resolution — may be lacking. If people have had to flee for their lives, the country or region they have fled to – think of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey or Kenya – has a better chance of staying stable if the new arrivals have shelter, medical care, and schools for their children.

If a conflict has destroyed farmland, and made a harvest impossible, those depending on food in that region will stay at home if they have food to eat, and support to start planting again.

Our guests gave us good examples of aid programmes that really have worked – they are often the ones that never make the headlines – and you can hear them by listening to this week’s Inside Geneva in full.

But Carbonnier reminded us that we cannot always apply a conventional yardstick of success to foreign aid. We will not necessarily see a return on our investment that we can immediately measure. We can though, be sure that trying to alleviate the suffering of others is a fundamental part of our existence as humans. It’s a key element in all religions, and it’s a tradition with thousands of years of history, from Roman emperors, to Christian monks, to today’s humanitarian organisations.

“What defines us is humanity”, said Carbonnier. “And humanity means we cannot stay idle when we see others suffering. We have to act and do something to try to protect them, to assist them, and to prevent suffering, regardless of where this happens.”

Who could disagree with that?

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