Foreign aid is doing more harm than good in Malawi—an OpEd in UK’s The Guardian

* It is time for us all to stop confusing short-term aid with long-term development—Grassroots Malawi director

* The conditions of Malawi, the poorest country in English-speaking Africa, have been gradually worsening over the last 40 years

* This is in part due to global climate change, but also to too much aid, which has been misinterpreted as development

By Duncan Mlanjira

After reading a story by The Guardian about the state of disaster caused by flash floods due to Cyclone Freddy, a concerned Grassroots Malawi Director, Benny Dembitzer contributed his thoughts on the publication’s Letters to the Editor page saying the article (Malawi President declares half of country damaged by cyclone (March 20) filled many with despair.

Dembitzer wrote: “The conditions of Malawi, the poorest country in English-speaking Africa, have been gradually worsening over the last 40 years. This is in part due to global climate change, but also to too much aid, which has been misinterpreted as development.

“Aid has discouraged local agency at all levels. According to the NGO Explorer website, there are over 900 NGOs working in Malawi registered with the Charity Commission in the UK. Then there are all the Irish, German and American NGOs and their projects.

“Floods and cyclones have affected the country in the last 20 years. Having more voluntary agencies coming into Malawi with their individual recipes to save the country is simply not going to help.

“More aid to Malawi will not change the basic issues of infrastructural weakness. In the rich north, we have not understood that trees are the only form of fuel to heat homes and cook food. Trees prevent land erosion, the overflowing of rivers and destruction of habitats. No one is tackling this challenge.”

Dembitzer singled out The Guardian’s editorial on March 19 that referred to the lack of funds available to the World Food Programme to feed the Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, saying: “While we all applaud its work in conflict areas, for which it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020, in Malawi and elsewhere it buys food from the richer farmers to give to the poorer communities.

“This has destroyed local agriculture and economic activity, and contributed to poverty. The WFP has become another agent that undermines food sovereignty among the world’s poorest communities.

“It is time for us all to stop confusing short-term aid with long-term development,” Dembitzer summons up.

According to its website, Grassroots Malawi was created to find lasting solutions to eradicating hunger and achieving food sovereignty within communities in the country, saying they “plan to achieve these goals by creating multi purpose development hubs anchored to existing structures and projects”.

They are working with local government, domestic civil society, foreign voluntary agencies, large & small donors, and the local farming and commercial communities “to work in greater unity”.

“It is our goal to create an organized united front to pool ideas and resources and help bring self sufficiency to the people of Malawi,” the NGO says.

According to Benny Dembitzer page, he is an international development economist specializing in the economics and management of small-scale enterprises. He was taught by Amartya Sen, one of the outstanding economists of the present era, who identified access to enough food as the key issue in liberation of people from starvation.

The website says: “Benny (not alone in the world), has become more and more convinced that the poverty and hunger in most of sub-Saharan Africa, a part of the world in which he has worked, studied, and travelled over the last half a century, are due to physical changes, including global warming that is inevitably affecting the tropics more than the Northern parts of the world, decreasing availability of water, soil erosion, and deforestation.

“But all attempts at overturning the rapidly diminishing food security across most of the continent is due to outside forces. They include the misguided applications of inappropriate agricultural strategies pushed by the North, land grab by outside interests, including foreign countries that are investing to produce for re-export to their own countries, the need to repay huge debts to international banks, including the World Bank that forces African countries to export more and more of their own unprocessed commodities at the cost of local food production, and the marketing tactics of International chemical companies.

“The latter come from the North as well as China. Above all, there are too many donors which all cut across one another and do not reach those who really need the help — elderly women farmers. All the aid given to sub-Saharan Africa is being consumed in the process of delivery.  We all should fight for food sovereignty in different countries and regions of the continent.”

Dembitzer has worked for 51 years across 36 countries in sub-Saharan Africa and also in Pakistan and Indonesia. Most of his work has been for International agencies, including the UNDP, the World Bank, UNIDO, ILO, ITC and for international NGOs, including OXFAM, CARE International, War on Want, Skillshare Africa, VSO.

He started Grassroots Africa in 2010, and has been involved with small-scale agricultural projects in Malawi ever since. He was a Rockefeller fellow in 2019 and currently he is Hon Fellow of University College, London, and was a member of the team that was awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

In the article that The Guardian published on March 20 described Cyclone Freddy as the longest-running tropical storm on record, whose effects has so far claimed 511 lives; injured 1,332 people, displaced 564,239 while the number of persons reported missing is at 533 — with 577 camps set to accommodate the displaced.

Chakwera had an exclusive interview with The Guardian’s Tracy McVeigh in which he asked for help from the international community and said the structural destruction was vast.

He is quoted as saying: “This demonstrates that climate change issues are real and we are standing right in the path of it” and adding that  “the climate crisis had the potential to keep a national like Malawi in perpetual poverty”.

“The damage is across 13 districts, almost half the country, and it is not just the numbers of our people who have lost their lives, but the damage and devastation,” Chakwera told The Guardian, adding that while the country’s early warning system had saved lives in some lower-lying areas, it had failed in others, and the landslides that devastated the city of Blantyre had been especially unexpected.

“We need everyone’s help and support for this tragedy to be mitigated. We are suffering and we can’t meet the needs. We have set up temporary camps and food is needed, shelter, yes, but must go past that and build stronger because of the damage.

“Some 36 roads are broken, nine bridges washed away, and cases still where people are stranded, whole villages we can’t reach. It’s not just here and there, we are at the receiving end of the worst of the climate change.

“I just feel that we need to be talking about this, keeping the conversation alive. It’s not a matter of saying be charitable to your neighbour, this has to do with loss and damage, this has to do with responses that are not tokenism.”

The Guardian took cognizance that Malawi had been hit by three cyclones within 13 months, and while trying to build back from Cyclone Idai in 2019, came Cyclones Ana and Gombe in 2022, then the CoVID-19 pandemic, followed by cholera outbreak — now Freddy.

“We are in a perpetual cycle of trying to pull ourselves up and getting knocked back down,” Chakwera told The Guardian.

It further reports that Cyclone Freddy first developed off Australia in early February and travelled almost 5,000 miles across the Indian Ocean, making landfall twice in south-east Africa — bringing torrential rains, high winds and killing more than 700 people across Mozambique, Madagascar, Zimbabwe and Malawi, including 16 onboard a Taiwanese-flagged ship.

As it dissipated on March 15, meteorologists said it was the longest-lasting and most travelled tropical cyclone ever recorded.

Chakwera further told The Guardian when he visited Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital that: “It is clear there will be psychological as well as social needs because of the depth of trauma people have suffered. Even the doctors need support as well after dealing with so much trauma.

“Once the rains subside, we will need to help these families stand on their own two feet. We need roads, we need hospitals and schools. Otherwise we are in big trouble. Malawian people to their credit are resilient people. So many of them grow up poor, it’s part of life.

“This is what we were trying to change. To give hope that Malawi can become a developed nation with industrialisation, to give young people more of a future than sustenance farming, to have modern sustainable agriculture. This is the vision we wanted to be casting, a country that can stand on its own feet.”

The Guardian then highlighted as background that in February, Nick Hepworth, executive director of Water Witness International, criticised the British government for slashing its contribution to the £90m Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters programme, known as BRACC in Malawi as part of the UK’s 2021 cut to the aid budget from 0.7% to 0.5% of GDP.

And Chakwera reacted to this by saying: “We understand that the British government has had its own problems. But from 2015 to the moment, the help that has come from the British government has significantly been reduced.

“We need help, significant help from everyone, but we cannot necessarily be pointing the finger at one government because we understand everybody has troubles.

“The devastation and impact of this is the worst yet we have seen – many people have told me they have never seen anything like this in their lifetime.”

The British Minister for development and Africa, Andrew Mitchell told the media that 27 members of the UK International Search & Rescue team and six emergency medical personnel had been dispatched for Malawi, which were handed over the boats to President Chakwera by acting British High Commissioner Sophia Willitts-King in Nsanje.

The international community continues to assist in the relief and recovery process as Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA) continues to remind the public, development partners and all stakeholders that affected people in clusters (sector working groups), require various relief items such as:

* Shelter (tarpaulin (4x6m), family tents/big tents; plastic sheet (120 micron), blankets, sleeping mats);

* Protection (clothes, lighting lamps, dignity kits);

* Heath (mosquito nets, mobile clinic services;

* Non-food items (plates, cups, pots);

* WASH (mobile toilets, water treatment chemicals, soap, buckets);

* Food & nutrition (maize/maize flour); corn soya blend, ready to use therapeutic food, cooking oil, pulses (beans, peas etc), soya pieces dry fish/kapenta, sugar, salt).