An Aid Memoir

When twenty-two-year-old Ian Smillie landed in Sierra Leone in August 1967 to teach at Koidu Secondary School, the volunteer with Canadian University Service Overseas could not have known he was beginning an extraordinary life of adventure and purpose.

Within a year, he was in charge of CUSO’s largest program in newly independent Nigeria, a vast nation of 39 million, deeply divided along religious, linguistic, and cultural lines. He was responsible for more than forty-five young volunteers, overseeing “their placement, their health, and their safety.” Later he became CUSO’s executive director and worked as a consultant to numerous governments and aid agencies.

In addition to providing a history and analysis of postwar foreign aid, Under Development is a witty and insightful memoir and among the best overviews of an optimistic era in global affairs, when this country still played an important role. Smillie eventually co-founded Inter Pares, one of Canada’s most effective international development organizations, to support groups in the poorest of poor countries according to their own priorities. (Inter pares is Latin for “among equals.”) And he’s written more than a dozen books, beginning with The Land of Lost Content, an apt description for the impact CUSO had on the thousands of young Canadians who served abroad. His has been a career marked by challenges, disappointments, and many surprises.

On his first day as CUSO executive director, for example, Smillie learned of a $6-million overdraft at the bank. He then had to defend CUSO after it was accused of supporting terrorism in southern Africa. He flew to Jamaica to investigate an allegation by its prime minister that CUSO was “politically infiltrated” on the island. And in Grenada, he had to untangle the organization from Maurice Bishop’s New JEWEL Movement after the prime minister and seven of his cabinet ministers were shot in a coup, prompting the United States to invade.

Too frequently, Smillie notes, foreign aid has come with strings attached — designed to benefit the donor nation as much as the recipient. Geopolitics and trade have also frustrated the goal of poverty alleviation. In 1993–94, for example, Canada’s top aid recipient was China. A decade later, Afghanistan and Iraq headed the list. Ten years after that, it was Ukraine.

In 2008, the Harper government cancelled aid programs in eight African countries, as well as in Cambodia and Sri Lanka. At the same time, it launched new programs in Colombia and Peru, where Canada had mining interests and where Ottawa was negotiating free trade agreements.

Even when aid is delivered, it’s often done without local involvement or any understanding of conditions on the ground. While evaluating a project in Afghanistan funded by the United States Agency for International Development (now being dismantled by the White House), Smillie met aid workers who were introducing crops to replace opium production and building a road to help farmers get that produce to market. But since the price for those crops was a quarter of the going rate for opium, it seemed to Smillie that USAID was ignoring the obvious: “Backwards rolled the logic.” In Kenya, an aid group set up a modern bakery to be run by women — superficially, a great idea. But when Smillie asked them why they were buying their own bread from an Italian baker instead, they told him the Italian’s loaf was cheaper and better.

Increasingly, remittances sent from diaspora communities in rich nations have been recognized as a better way to achieve lasting poverty reduction. According to the World Bank figures cited by Smillie, these remittances to low- and middle-income regions equalled $501 billion (U.S.) in 2019 alone. But half of that went to India, China, the Philippines, Mexico, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Egypt — with only 9.5 percent going to all of sub-Saharan Africa. This form of wealth transfer certainly benefits national economies and families alike, but it doesn’t necessarily build clinics or vaccinate kids where the need is greatest.

Nor has foreign investment proven to be an anti-poverty panacea. Consider Chad, where foreign investment in the oil industry has resulted in an annual growth rate double that of the U.S. and a per capita income greater than in half the countries in Africa. Yet Chad still has a low life expectancy and terrible adult literacy rates, and it ranked 187th out of 189 countries on the UN Human Development Index for 2019, when more than 60 percent of its population was living on less than $1.25 per day. Chronic corruption and political instability prevent the benefits of foreign oil investment from filtering down.

“After 50 years in the business, sufficient travel points for a small flat on British Airways and enough typhoid, yellow fever, cholera and COVID vaccine to fill a jug,” Smillie now asks himself, “Does aid work?” Surprisingly, his answer remains a qualified yes.

Investments in literacy, public health, vaccinations, and clean drinking water can work, he maintains. But to achieve lasting solutions that provide what rich nations enjoy — effective health and education systems, social safety nets, rule of law, and fairly elected governments that answer to citizens — they must take priority over other agendas. By that measure, it’s hard to argue that the past fifty years of international aid and development have made much progress or taken us away from the land of lost content.