Foreign aid’s ‘white saviour complex’

The recent freeze on foreign aid by the United States, alongside the dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development, has attracted significant concern and attention, including in our region of the world. Many have rushed to defend USAID’s work in supporting the needs of the most vulnerable – and keeping our world safe.

Their points are valid, to a degree. American aid cannot be replaced easily. In the education sector in which I work, USAID is the third largest bilateral donor, with a sizeable portion of this funding targeted at conflict and crisis-affected contexts. For millions of young people, such support provides access to education that may not be available otherwise.

But, returning to the way things were prior to new US President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing foreign aid is not the answer. There is an opportunity, at present, to fundamentally rethink how the entire aid architecture works. Rather than addressing and resolving many of the global challenges and inequities we face today, the structures we have in place perpetuate and worsen them. As one senior humanitarian worker has commented, “They [donors like the US] neglect international norms, support conflict, destroy the environment, and prioritise economic growth above people’s lives.”

As an academic specialising in education in conflict zones, I’ve recently co-facilitated a discussion in the journal COMPARE identifying the failures of the current structures of aid, and how we might reimagine this system.

The failures of aid to education today

Firstly, any foreign assistance is intricately tied to the geopolitical and economic interests of the donors. For instance, while education remains a poorly supported aspect of humanitarian responses, this is made worse by the ways in which funders step in to support some crises but ignore educational needs in others.

Analyses by the Inter-agency Network of Education in Emergencies highlights how populations most in need of funding for education programmes are being left behind. This is because ‘high-profile’ crises crowd out space and funding for other situations which don’t capture the imagination of the international community. This has resulted in crises like Ukraine attracting considerable support for example, despite the needs being greatest in places like Sudan and Syria.

Additionally, foreign aid has also been used as a tool for winning ‘hearts and minds’ in conflict-affected areas globally. Education aid in particular has become a tool for ‘placation of the restless natives’ just as it was under colonial regimes. In Afghanistan, for example, donors have supported curriculum reform to either support regime change, or to justify the presence of other regimes (such as the US and its allies).

In Palestine, I’ve documented how education has been used by donors since the Oslo Accords as a tool against extremism and radicalisation, without any attempt to address the root causes of the nearly 80-year conflict with Israel.

And educational initiatives implemented by international organisations are often designed in the Global North with little or no input from people affected by crisis. When actually put in place, they promote western educational norms and knowledge systems, and have little long-term impact on learners or their communities.

Many of these schemes also frame young people as traumatised and unable to cope without external support. This contributes to a ‘white saviour industrial complex‘.

For example, one fundraising video produced by an international humanitarian organisation depicts a young girl, visibly disturbed by the violence around her, being rescued by an individual wearing the organisation’s logo on her vest who shepherds her into a classroom where she now apparently feels safe.

The video suggests that crisis-affected communities can’t manage themselves and external interventions are needed to ‘save the day’. This undermines embedded strengths and resources that communities already have at their disposal. Such dynamics are similar to what happened under colonisation, where the expansion of institutionalised ‘western’ schooling was justified as one of saving brown and black bodies from themselves.

A moment for reimagining

Foreign aid has always been a weak form of reparation for legacies of colonisation and imperialism, mainly because it positions those at the core of the global economy as having a moral obligation to redistribute some of that wealth from a position of benevolence.

However, this doesn’t acknowledge that those controlling the purse strings only enjoy this privilege because of a history of ongoing oppression and domination. It is unlikely that we can expect solutions and innovation to come from the very countries responsible for current global injustices.

Aid needs to be framed as a matter of achieving global justice, which means freeing it from the vested interests and racial prejudices that determine who is deserving and who is not.

A radical alternative would be a global wealth tax, and a system of delivering aid which provides unconditional cash transfers directly into the hands of those most in need, bypassing the intermediaries who are currently part of the current system. Such an approach is entirely achievable, given our digital world, and would restore a level of local agency, dignity and self-reliance, while also being more efficient.

It would mean that rather than externally driven interests and agendas shaping education aid for millions of young people, a diverse range of views on learning which are transparent about who is being taught what and why could finally re-emerge.

In the interim, however, the full withdrawal of life-saving and sustaining assistance from the US, with nothing to replace it, is both immoral and unjust.

How we as a global community maintain a shared, rather than self-interested, responsibility to the most vulnerable among us remains one of humanity’s most pressing challenges.

And given what is happening in the US, it requires urgent attention.