Inadequacies of Foreign Aid

US currently provides a vast amount of foreign aid for development - they spent about 26 billion in 2015. Humanitarian aid is part of that, split up mainly into disaster risk reduction (DRR) and emergency relief with only 2% for DRR. (DoS; USAID) DRR has huge potential for saving more lives and money. Recipient countries of humanitarian aid get so much emergency relief that they stop investing in preventing disasters from happening in the first place, knowing foreign aid will bust them out (“Dead Aid” Moyo). Less emergency relief and more DRR will fix that - and save US money. Eric Schwartz, the former United States Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, reports that every dollar spent on DRR saves US $5-10 in losses from disasters compared to a dollar spent on emergency response.

Humanitarian aid isn’t the only aspect that needs fixing, though. Aid in general is constantly misused to manifest war and violence for the recipient government’s benefit. Some recipient governments use it to forcibly relocate and/or suppress citizen’s criticisms of their actions. (Oakland Institute)

US needs to start making smarter decisions in their funding in aid. Increased amounts of aid is not going to solve poverty or bad government. We can start by increasing DRR and going into the actual recipient countries and communicating with the citizens, finding out exactly what they need and not what we think they need.


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If you want to learn more, check out NPR’s Have and Have-Nots (www.npr.org/2013/10/16/2357816…). I would share my research paper, but plagiarism ; P