Visibility without Power

Prominent Global North development actors, including the United Nations, have faced criticism for centring Africa in public relations, speeches, and humanitarian branding, without any commensurate inclusion of the continent in decision-making or its power structures. The composition of the permanent membership of the UN Security Council and its arsenal of veto dominance is largely European, thereby relegating Africa to the margins of real global economic and political power.

The counter-argument of institutionalists is that the 1944 negotiations for the UN’s establishment in Dumbarton Oaks, led by the Allied powers, took place when many African nations were under external colonial rule. This reasoning, while rooted in obsolescence, disregards the undemocratic lack of representation for 54 African states comprising 28 per cent of the entire UN membership. The caricaturing of Africa as a beneficiary of European goodwill, while alienating the continent from being an architect of global power, engenders a cyclical system where dependency is normalized and aid is presented as benevolence.

Where the Money Goes

The MDGs encompassed initiatives on poverty reduction, education, food, clean water, and medicine, with a focus on combating AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. Africa was projected as the primary theatre for global poverty alleviation that necessitated billions in humanitarian spending. In reality, as reflected in a 2018 Oxfam report and a 2016 Development Initiatives study, less than 10 per cent of MDG funding was allocated to local grassroots organizations, with the bulk of aid being expended on international businesses that offered consultancy, procurement, and logistics services. The United Nations, private contractors, and many international organizations expended significant percentages of humanitarian budgets on overheads, salaries, and flights for expatriate staff.

In response to emerging globalization issues, in 2015, the SDGs were commissioned to include goals addressing inequalities, climate and governance. The UN Economic Commission for Africa itself, while citing the $1.3 trillion SDG African financing gap and vast unmet needs at the grassroots, has argued that foreign aid will not close the gap. Instead, it has called for structural reforms to expand domestic resource mobilization, strengthen regional value chains, and invest in sustainable industries. Officially, the United Nations Development Programme retains approximately 7–8 per cent of contributions for indirect costs under its General Management Support framework, about three times the rates reaching grassroots organizations in underserved communities.

In 2016, the Grand Bargain campaign advocated a target allocation of 25 per cent of African humanitarian funding to local African organizations by the year 2020. Lamentably, by 2020, humanitarian funding to local organizations had in fact fallen to 2.1 per cent, down from an earlier 3.5 per cent. This decline has been driven by entrenched power asymmetries in the aid system, where donors channel funds through international intermediaries to retain control, impose compliance regimes that systematically sideline smaller actors, and reinforce a cycle that keeps local organizations at the margins of humanitarian response.

A 2025 UNECA report, ‘Aid Won’t Close Africa’s $1.3 Trillion SDG Gap’, captures the implications of this shortfall. The report argues that Africa cannot rely on external aid flows to meet its development financing needs. Instead, attention must shift from a narrow dependence on international assistance to strategies centred on domestic resource mobilization, deeper regional integration, and structural transformation away from raw material exports.

Stalled Industrialization from UN Specialized and Affiliated Institutions

The UN’s affiliation with, and its overlapping roles alongside, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and International Monetary Fund), bodies which have imposed structural reforms that systemically dismantled African industrialization, call into question the agenda served by the UN’s humanitarian compensation. Since the Bretton Woods Conference of 1944, which established the World Bank and IMF, the UN has operated alongside these specialized agencies to coordinate international development and economic policy. The WTO, created in 1995 as a successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, also works in tandem with the UN’s development programmes. These longstanding affiliations mean that UN humanitarian initiatives are closely intertwined and supported by these bodies, making them an inseparable part of the global governance system that the UN oversees.

Africa’s capability for self-sustenance has been hampered by WTO regimes of tariff escalation, agricultural subsidies for the Global North and intellectual property rules that keep African economies reliant on imports. Unfair trade policies, negotiated, codified, and enforced by the WTO, impose structural chokeholds on local manufacturing of a plethora of products and goods, making the continent a sanctuary for the extraction and exportation of cheap raw materials while serving as a market for processed results of extracted resources sold at a higher price.

The scathing irony of international humanitarian aid is that it is, in many cases, utilized to procure goods from the Global North for African consumption. Thus, investing in and boosting European businesses while Africa serves the unsustainable role of consumer. Unfortunately, the WTO imposes strict restrictions on the production of helpful medicines for cancer treatment, vaccines, and HIV/AIDs in Africa. South Africa, a country facing the HIV/AIDS crisis, fought to relax WTO TRIPS restrictions, but the WTO framework initially upheld American big pharma monopolies. This occurred at a period when nearly 4.2 million South Africans were living with HIV and an estimated 800 – 1,300 people were dying each day from AIDS-related illnesses.

The balance of trade deficits in many African nations is reinforced by UN affiliates on whose platform the continent’s economic dependency, its preclusion from developing competitive local industries, and its mass importations of food and even basic medicine from external suppliers are brokered. The irony of the UN’s socio-economic engagement with Africa is that while it foregrounds humanitarianism and development goals, it often avoids and sometimes actively sustains the structural causes of African underdevelopment. Aside from unequal trade regimes, this includes debt dependency, capital flight, resource exploitation, and external conditionalities on domestic policy.

Importantly, technical aid from Bretton Woods Institutions, particularly the IMF, is tied to reforms that frequently hollowed out African state capacity rather than empowering it, particularly during the Structural Adjustment era (1980-2014). Following IMF-mandated policy reforms and the conditionalities attached to loans in many African nations in the 1980s, several countries were forced to devalue currencies, faced increased income inequality, rising debt levels, slowed GDP growth, and deteriorating social conditions.

A grossly understudied aspect of the IMF’s Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) in many African countries is how the institution’s economic prescriptions created incentives that shaped what was funded and taught, indirectly narrowing educational focus. Exercising strong indirect influence through funding constraints and policy conditionality, SAPs led to significant reductions in public spending on education in many Global South countries. These budget cuts frequently prioritized vocational and technical training over broader liberal arts or humanities curricula. This, for instance, led to the removal of valuable subjects such as history, which could have enlightened young Africans about the perils of colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade as well as other factors that shape Africa’s underdevelopment. For instance, the National Policy on Education, implemented in Nigeria in 1982, removed History from the primary and junior secondary curricula. The rationale was to align education with immediate economic needs and workforce demands, emphasizing ‘cost-effective’ programs perceived as more directly linked to economic productivity.

The Gospel of Humanitarianism

The administrative ineptitude of many African governments, the bitter ethnicization of national politics, and the extractive activities of foreign multinational corporations are among the factors that give rise to political instability, conflicts, and underdevelopment on the continent. While no legitimate expectations or entitlement can be placed on external institutions like the UN to directly address these causes, dependency scholars such as Thandika Mkandawire and neo-patrimonial theorists like Nicolas van de Walle fault UN humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations for not merely evading the root cause of Africa’s socio-economic problems, but in fact exacerbating it. The gospel of humanitarianism coexists with the contradictory dogma of economic dependency, which ensures that while the symptoms of Africa’s deprivation are addressed through aid, the causes of such underdevelopment are meticulously avoided.

This aid-dependency paradox is evident in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where, despite decades of aid and intervention, the DRC remains mired in poverty, climate destruction, and recurrent conflict. In both the MDGs and SDGs, the UN has focused on measurable outputs (vaccinations, school attendance and peacekeeping missions) while avoiding the root causes of African economic vulnerability. In places like the DRC, decades of UN peacekeeping and aid have not addressed the resource extraction economy that fuels instability. Multinationals, often protected by global trade rules, exploit these minerals. Reports have documented how even UN peacekeepers and contractors have been complicit in corruption, sexual abuse, and illicit resource flows.

The phenomenon of ‘NGO-ization’ (prevalent in Nairobi and other major East African cities) underscores how external aid flows via international organizations and their affiliates, which are then fragmented to provide only donor-allowed services rather than holistic societal transformation. Van de Walle argues that aid dependency entrenched neo-patrimonial structures by sustaining regimes without pressing for reform. A percentage of aid is, in some cases, paid informally by international organizations to elites to secure passage of humanitarian goods and services or peacekeeping operations, thereby encouraging corruption and widening existing socio-economic inequalities. 

Mkandawire critiques how neo-patrimonialism is fuelled when external rents (aid, oil, minerals) reduce reliance on citizen taxation. Michael Bratton and Van de Walle, experts on African political economy, further suggest that aid dependence weakens state capacity by making governments more accountable to donors than to citizens. The donors’ willingness to keep funding states with poor governance may encourage elites or governments to avoid accountability to their people. The deliberate avoidance of these issues by many UN institutionalists, by proposing that humanitarian loans, initiatives or programmes should prioritize donor interests rather than local issues, is striking. The notion that these would somehow translate into economic development, in the face of practical realities, appears rather underwhelming. It is not a question of more; it is a question of how.