Reconfiguring Aid

On Monday 2nd June 2025, addressing the African Union, Bill Gates, the third richest man in the world, said that the Foundation has three priorities: ending preventable death of millions of babies, ensuring the next generation grows up without having to suffer from deadly infectious diseases, and lifting millions of people out of poverty.

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It would be difficult to challenge what Mr Gates aims to achieve, but anyone with any knowledge of the reality at the grassroots in rural sub Saharan Africa will be able to tell him is that the way in which he has addressed those challenges is so faulty that at the end of the life of the Foundation, which is stated will be 2045, none of those noble goals will be achieved.

He said, at the same meeting, which a friend of mine attended, that he has already spent over $100 billion. Not all of that has gone to Africa, but he is so involved with so many projects that Africa will account for the majority of that expenditure.

But what evidence has Mr Gates provided that his extremely noteworthy contribution has reduced poverty anywhere in Africa? Has starvation decreased? Have there been any improvements in the life of people living in rural areas - where the overwhelming majority of poor people are to be found - become less poor? Have the number of primary schools increased? Has any country in Africa reformed its land tenure systems so that the farmers know for certain what their rights over the land they till might be?

The answer to all of the above rhetorical questions is a resounding NO. The number of people who have been helped by Mr Gates are not the farmers and their families, but the research establishments around the world, large NGOs that have bid for a variety of contracts, large pharmaceutical companies that have undertaken huge projects of research, international chemical companies that have been marketing seeds that farmers do not know how to use, universities all over the world that have new departments.

What above all has happened is that by dispensing aid, Mr Gates has fostered an atmosphere in which asking for the right donation or a donation for the right cause will mean that you can do less for yourself and someone else can help you.

This is a serious challenge which aid from all sources over the last 30 to 40 years has not addressed. We have removed from local people their own power of agency. Mr. Gates and the enormous amounts of money he can leverage should take a completely different approach. It should encourage primary education with a strong bend on agriculture across a few African nations that could show the way for others. It should help the poorest to achieve land rights. No less a person than Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize-winning economist,  voiced this as the major obstacle to the development of agriculture across the continent. Yet it has been started in some African countries and it could be applied elsewhere with the right support. Mr Gates should encourage the development and propagation of local seed varieties by local people. He should encourage women’s group; women are the agent of change across the whole of Africa. 

Above all, Mr Gates should show us that what matters is not the quantity of aid that needs to be examined, but the results. The quantity seems to have created its own pool of largesse from which a large numbers of middle class people across the world have been drinking. He needs to change its focus to the much larger and much poorer conditions of rural farmers. More than 80% of all food production across Africa is produced by small scale farmers. Poverty is on the land and it must be tackled on the land.

Please read my book, Mr Gates. It reflects more than half a century of experience across Africa as well as Indonesia. I can send you a copy if you promise to read it.

It is, THE GLOBAL FAMINE GAMES: TOXIC AID, WEAPON OF WAR, PERVERSE ECONOMICS

LinkedIn - Benny Dembitzer

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