Aid & Power

Bill Gates has set ambitious goals for Africa. Benny Dembitzer asks whether another top-down aid programme can succeed without understanding how poverty is experienced on the ground.

World Food Day brings familiar images of empty bowls, failed harvests and emergency distributions. They show real suffering. They can also hide the systems that decide who can afford to eat. The latest UN food security report estimates that 645 million people faced hunger in 2025. About 2.7 billion people could not afford a healthy diet. Those figures tell us that hunger is not only about whether food exists. It is about income, prices, land, power, transport, debt and whose

When the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings open in Bangkok, the language will be familiar: growth, resilience, reform, mobilisation and opportunity. One number should follow delegates into every session. Between 2022 and 2024, developing countries paid out 741 billion dollars more in principal and interest on external debt than they received in new financing. According to the World Bank, it was the largest gap in at least fifty years. In 2024 alone, low- and middle-income co

For a decade, the humanitarian sector has promised to move power closer to the people responding first. The money tells a different story. The Grand Bargain set a target for 25 per cent of humanitarian funding to reach local and national actors. ODI Global's latest analysis found that in 2024, just under 10 per cent reached them directly and indirectly. Direct funding was only 3.8 per cent. That is not a technical shortfall. It is a decision about who is trusted to lead, empl

Every intermediary in aid can explain why it exists. Far fewer can explain what it costs, what power it keeps and when it will stop being needed. Money intended for people living in poverty rarely travels directly from a donor to a local organisation. It moves through governments, multilateral agencies, international NGOs, contractors, consultants and national partners before reaching the people closest to the problem. Each layer has a justification. Together, those layers ca

People sometimes hear my criticism of international aid and assume I want the large NGOs abolished. I do not. When an earthquake destroys a city, when war cuts families off from food, when floods contaminate water supplies, large humanitarian organisations can move people, money and supplies at a scale that local groups may not yet be equipped to manage. Their staff often work in dangerous conditions. Many are local staff serving their own communities. Walking away from that

More than a thousand aid workers have been killed in the past three years. Almost all of them were local people, serving their own communities. That should change how we think about all of it.

At a recent Development Assistance Committee meeting in Paris, I sat through two plenary sessions on “rewiring aid.” Not once was there a reference to how effectively aid actually reaches the grassroots, where hunger takes its toll. Two round table discussions followed. Same result. I raised a simple point: while the room debated shifting aid priorities to suit the geopolitical interests of the North, 35,000 to 40,000 people were dying of starvation that day, and every day. I