Opinion: Aid can no longer be dictated by foreign policy or geopolitics

For decades, critics have been claiming that aid is a key mechanism of foreign policy, highlighting that aid is inherently political. Politics, in turn, is controlled by geopolitical trends which are about amassing power and wealth.

This is a fact that the global development sector as a whole has tended to conveniently ignore.

The Western aid institutions that have been going through a reckoning and are talking about  “shifting the power,” “decolonization,” or “localization,” were never altruistic. They were and remain political institutions based on state ideology of resource extraction and control. This completely changes the perception that aid is about “doing good,” which is what the general public, including recipients of aid in the global south, have consistently been given.