Dr. Vineeta Gupta, the Director of the ACTION Global Health Advocacy Partnership Secretariat in Washington DC published an opinion article in the publication The New Humanitarian responding to the exchanges between the technology billionaire Elon Musk and David Beasley of the UN World Food Programme:
Musk is probably not going to sign that $6 billion cheque (though it would be great if he did), but he is not wrong about the aid sector being broken. He, like many others, just doesn’t seem to understand why; or perhaps he has a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Wealthy elites tend to think it’s a question of management strategies and transparent accounting – that surely the administrators of charities must be wasting money instead of running a lean and brutally efficient private sector industry. So, yes, the global aid sector is broken, but not because of management. It is broken because it has to pander to billionaire donors like Musk, while boardrooms of mostly Western white men make decisions based solely on the preferences of their billionaire donors.
I’ve personally seen this play out countless times. The deeply entrenched disparities within the aid sector fall across lines of racial, gender, and power inequality, to the point that when a tenaciously successful charity organisation based in Bangalore, Kampala, Addis Ababa, or Tegucigalpa comes forward to seek grant funding, they find themselves having to shape their programming to fit the expectations of people like Musk.
For many of the largest institutions and sources of financing, we are answering to the wrong stakeholders, judging by the wrong metrics, and ignoring equity as the centrepiece of aid financing, programming, and execution.
Read the full article in The New Humanitarian.
