“In 2023, the richest 1% in the Global North were paid US$263 billion by the Global South through the financial system–over US$30 million an hour.” - Takers Not Makers (Oxfam)
In comparison, the global aid budget for Official Development Assistance came to around US$223.3 billion that same year, a pittance. If we’re honest with ourselves, aid was never really about charity in the first place. We’ve known for a long time that the Aid-Versus-Trade equation doesn’t add up. Over 20 years ago, a scathing report revealed that unfair trade rules designed to favour the richest countries cost the poorest countries over twice as much as all official aid. Today, billionaires and their constituents extract over US$400 billion in interest payments alone from the developing world, which also loses as much as US$3 trillion a year through unrecorded, often illicit, capital flight to the corporate-industrial complex in the Minority World.
Yet, we are still fighting over scraps from the master’s table. Instead of intensifying our competition as the scraps diminish, we ought to show solidarity in scrapping the master instead.
We’d have to be asleep at the wheel to forget that foreign aid has always been an arm of the foreign policy interests of a State. The architects of the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII were happy to admit “that our objective has as its background the needs and interests of the people of the United States. We need markets—big markets—in which to buy and sell." Fast forward to 2025, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio is toeing the same line: "Every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must make America safer, stronger, and more prosperous." Aid is about interests, not philanthropy, prompting some to throw off the shackles of the non-profit-industrial complex altogether. (And it has certainly never been about reparations!)
But we know this. Australia moved AusAID (the Australian Agency for International Development) into DFAT (the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) in 2013. The UK merged DFID (the Department for International Development) into FCO (the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) in 2020. So why are we shocked at the gutting of USAID to subsume it into the State Department? All of these moves are designed to align aid with trade, signalling an end to the era in which “charity” was useful in the propaganda war for power.
As soft power, aid served a wildly effective machine, a cover for the atrocities of States. This is notoriously epitomized by the US’s diabolical broadcast to Afghan people that food aid and cluster bombs would both be dropped in yellow plastic containers. To many, that’s what aid has become – an explosive wrapped in the same packaging as assistance. “Many resistance movements in poor countries” as Booker Prize winning author Arundhati Roy so bluntly released, “view Human Rights NGOs as modern day missionaries who’ve come to take the ugly edge off Imperialism. To defuse political anger and to maintain the status quo.” Is it any wonder that the discontents of the international aid system include such unlikely bedfellows as both Trump and Chomsky (granted, for entirely different reasons).
The public doesn’t care much about that anymore. No one is going to be voted into office for espousing a message of compassion, let alone reparations for colonial oppression. We don’t even like foreigners on our own soil, let alone sending our tax dollars to foreign soil, a political calculation made most recently by the UK government’s slashing of its aid budget to fund military spending. The lines in the sand have been drawn anew as the age of soft power gives way to hard power politics with a typical cast of old white men at the helm. Right now, the world wants to re-arm itself, not hand out food stamps.
“Why should our institutions fix their destitution anyway?” Of course, there’s a good counter to that: perhaps because it’s our fault they are destitute in the first place. But it’s hard to fit explanations about the legacies of colonialism in between the angry shouts of increasingly impoverished constituents in colonial countries. The growing wealth inequality that raises taxes for the lowest earners and cuts them for the wealthiest is not the fault of the poorest among us. After all, most of our information comes from mass media controlled by an elite class, and we now have the world’s richest man tacitly running the world’s most powerful country.
So while we mourn the disastrous effects of the aid industry’s collapse – up to 166,000 malaria deaths, 1 million children untreated from Severe Acute Malnutrition, 28,000 cases of infectious diseases like Ebola and Marburg, 200,000 children paralyzed by polio – we do not mourn the death of its soft power. At least the truth is unequivocally out – what governments in the Minority World ultimately care about is protecting their own interests. It means billions of dollars less in grants to foreign governments and non-profit organisations to support some of the most marginalised communities. But it also means billions of less decisions led by technocrats in colonial capitals controlling the delivery of aid and human rights work worldwide.
It is a defining moment for civil society that requires a total subversion of “business-as-usual”. Funding sources will change, perhaps eliminating the logic of aid altogether – the revolution will not be funded. But if there’s a silver lining somewhere, it’s in the resilience of communities around the world to these shocks, because this is not news to them. Surviving the systemic injustice stemming from the Minority World is already “business-as-usual”. They have been moved by a myriad of oppressions for decades, even centuries, and learned the art of survival the way that tech-billionaires could never dream of.
Fortunately, we are not without solutions. The current development approaches that grew out of an era of international cooperation and solidarity, such as the human rights based approach, needs a new iteration that can respond to an age of rising authoritarianism, plummeting funding, and lost trust in human rights. We need to learn an approach that can be led by communities affected by injustice that refocuses our actions and decisions on models that dismantle unjust systems and hold power to account to shift the planet towards social and environmental justice. The question will be how long it takes for the nonprofit-industrial-complex to reshape itself around a holistic answer to these challenges.
The reason the “arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice” is not because there’s some altruistic fate of the universe but because when all is chipped away and there’s nothing left, we still hear demands for justice from every corner of the globe. That is the hard truth that hard power cannot depose. And it’s those voices that should reset the entire humanitarian and development sector. In the words of Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, “This is not a drill. We are underfunded, overstretched and under attack. But we have not lost the argument. Our cause is mighty, and our movement is strong.”
The good news is that we are in the violent death-throws of late-stage capitalism, rearing its powerful head one last time before it falls on its own sword. The time of the white man was never going to end without a fight. Those of us working in the aid sector cannot continue to shout about the end of funding without taking a step back to recognize how the entire system has always been broken and demanding a reimagination of the movement for global justice. While aid may not survive, a growing movement of community activism around the world already has the resilience to create a different vision for the future – only now, with less strings attached.
Matt Kletzing is one of the co-founders and co-directors of United Edge and one of the original architects of the Justice Based Approach and one of the lead facilitators of the groundbreaking JBA Foundation Course.