The Dichotomy Between ‘Donor’ and ‘Beneficiary is a Lie
By Nora Lester Murad, Dalia Association, Palestine
The global aid system is predicated on the premise that there are givers and receivers. Their relationship is characterized by a one-way transfer of resources from donors to beneficiaries. The purpose of the transfer is to provide benefit to the receiver (“beneficiaryâ€). Or is it?
Who is really benefiting from the international aid system?
-Donor countries decide how to allocate aid based on their own foreign policy objectives and in response to domestic pressure. Thus, aid is a mechanism for furthering their own interests as they see them.
-Donor countries, to varying extents, require that aid be spent in their countries, through their national organizations (for-profit or non-profit), or on their designated consultants. Thus, a significant percentage of aid resources are diverted back to the donors’ economies.
-Aid actors, as extensions of donors, build empire-like organizations in third world countries. These aid actors accumulate disproportionate power in relation to local actors by leveraging their power as 1) gatekeepers of resources, 2) power brokers, 3) purchasers, and 4) employers.
And who is really doing the giving?
-Third world countries provide the natural resources for development in the global north.
-Third world countries provide the labor for development in the global north.
-Third world countries provide the customers for sellers in the global north.
So, the international economy, including the international aid system, is one that perpetuates, not challenges, global inequalities. The donors are, in fact, the beneficiaries of the system. The recipients are actually the ones that give the most resources. Make sense of that!
The only way to make sense of the nonsensical situation is to recognize that money is only one currency for exchanging value. For example, if a donor pays for a poor person’s meal, this is considered “aid†and is accounted for in financial terms. If a poor person welcomes a poor neighbor for a meal, this is not recognized as a contribution nor granted any monetary value. Or, if an international organization hires a local to provide services, this is considered “aid†and is accounted for in financial terms. However, if a local person provides services on a voluntary basis, this is not recognized as a contribution or granted any monetary value.
Thus, in our current global financial system, the substantial resources of the third world are unvalued, while relatively minor contributions from the global north are given exaggerated value (even when they are wasted). While third world communities are the biggest givers, their giving is not recognized as having value, except when given in the currency valued by the global economic system – money.
Alternative economics offer great potential to displace money as the sole valued currency and to visibilize the value of third world resources. For example, today, a shared taxi may travel from city to city half empty while an old farmer walks the same distance carrying apples on her head. The driver arrives at his destination without having earned enough cash to purchase apples for his family. The farmer has to walk because she doesn’t have cash to pay her taxi fare. If the driver were willing to accept an apple for payment of the fare, the latent/unutilized resource (the empty taxi seat) would be converted into tangible value, with benefit for the driver, the farmer and the environment.
Obviously, this type of culture change does not occur easily, but there are some examples of alternative economies on a small scale, in both the global south and the global north. Alternative economies present a huge opportunity to southern actors to release themselves from the dominance of international monetary organizations and the global financial system in which they can never be winners, much less players on an equal field. Just alternative economies have the potential to emasculate the international monetary system by eliminating any residual logic to the donor-beneficiary dichotomy and giving fair value to the resources, capacities and accomplishments of southern actors. And creating just alternative economies is something that we can do ourselves – without any “aid†at all.