IFAD Lecture: Winnie Byanyima on the future of aid
Wednesday, 2015/04/08 | 08:15:00
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Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International, delivered the inaugural IFAD Lecture at the 38th session of the Governing Council, IFAD's annual meeting of Member States. Her lecture – entitled 'The Future of Aid' – took place on 17 February 2015. It was the first in a planned series that IFAD has launched to advance thinking on rural transformation as a key to sustainable development in the post-2015 world.
First of all, let me thank very much IFAD’s President for inviting me to give this inaugural lecture. I'm honoured. It's a great pleasure to be here and to have the opportunity to speak with you, Council members and others. I have been asked to speak about the future of aid in a post-2015 world.
Let me tell you a little bit about myself first. I was born in a small town, then a really very rural town, Mbarara, in south-western Uganda. My mother told me that on the day I was born, that she was in her sweet potato garden, harvesting her potatoes, when she felt me pushing out. She washed, got her little suitcase and went by the roadside to wait for a car to take her to the hospital three miles away.
A passer-by stopped and gave her a lift. She said by the time she reached the hospital, I was almost halfway out, and that by the time she got into the labour ward, I was already out. In our language, we call children, we give them names according to the events around their birth. So I could've been called … "born in the sweet potato garden." I could have been called … "almost born on the road," and that would have been a good name for me, considering the many miles I have clocked traveling around the world. Or I could have been called … "born in a clinic." And that would have been special because at that time, only about 20 per cent of children were born in clinics.
Today in Uganda, it's about 40 per cent, children who are born with a health professional. Forty per cent – it hasn't changed a lot from when I was born. And the figure is even lower in rural areas. So life hasn't changed very much for rural people. So this subject of rural transformation is dear to me. I see myself more as a survivor, even though I have very happy memories of my life in our small rural town.
So increasingly, questions are being asked: How relevant is aid in this day and age, compared to other ways of mobilizing resources? How much impact can aid have? Is aid key to the success of the post-2015 global development framework?
Books have been written, articles published. The debate is raging, and rightly so. To explore this issue with you today, I will share my thoughts in two areas: Why and how aid must change in the post-2015 world. And secondly, three fundamental challenges for rural development.
I will say that aid is important in the fight against these challenges – the three being climate change, rising economic inequality and women's empowerment. Aid is important in the fight against these three challenges – but only with a fundamental recalibration of the way it is designed and delivered.
So first, why and how aid must change. Many of the biggest development challenges ahead of us cannot be solved by aid.
But don't get me wrong, though. In absolute terms, volumes of traditional Overseas Development Assistance [ODA] are increasing. In 43 countries where 221 million extremely poor people live, ODA is still larger than any other form of external finance.
But aid is starting to be eclipsed by other forms of development finance – such as foreign direct investment and remittances. At the same time, new donors from emerging economies are entering the development space and the humanitarian space. This presents huge opportunities, but also significant challenges.
Meanwhile, it is increasingly clear that the resources to end poverty and hunger must ultimately come from the domestic resources of countries themselves – for reasons of sustainability, as well as of sovereignty.
We have all seen the legacy of underperforming aid:
See: http://www.ifad.org/events/gc/38/aid.htm
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