How It Works

The essence of karma colonialism is that it always looks nice, even as it undermines the societies it claims to help. These stories show some of the ways that the West allows itself to be deceived by the aid industry.

Left: Karma colonialism always looks nice. Here, U.S. Navy Seabees build a school in Timor Leste. But they’re doing it to benefit America, not Timor Leste.
Right: “Free” sounds generous. Aid projects usually involve giving away things free. It sounds nice – but it’s a way that wealthier nations keep others poorer, and dependent.
Left: Experts vs. Chimps: The U.N. sends “development experts” to tell the global South what to do. But do these “experts” really understand life in other countries? For that matter, are they any wiser than dart-throwing chimpanzees? Thanks for asking….
Right: Bribes. UNICEF gave vehicles to Zimbabwean officials “to help review the school curriculum.” Nonsense. Thinly-disguised bribes like this open the door for foreign aid staff, who then push policies that benefit their Western employers.
Man with a camera
Left: Why won’t they hire local talent? World Vision, UNICEF, Save the Children, and others issue frequent reports on how they’re helping people in distant lands. Why do they prefer to hire Western photographers for these reports?
Right: Pygmalion and Golem. A U.S. Navy crew builds a school in Djibouti, Africa. That seems nice. But the underlying message is not merely harmful, it is downright racist: “You can’t do anything without our help.”
Left: Where does the aid money go? Those that know best, aren’t talking. But various estimates find that 60-90% of “foreign aid” quickly returns to the donor country — or never leaves at all.
Right: Charity is not development. The aid industry promises development but does charity. They are opposites. Aid projects are the new, softer face of colonialism, often achieving the very opposite of what they promise.
Left: GDP seems neutral. It is not. Why is GDP so often misused as a measure of a country’s overall well-being? Because that shapes policy to favor the global elite.
Right: Mimicry. The aid industry collects piles of data about things that don’t really matter, while ignoring the things that do. To understand this, it helps to understand the concept of mimicry.
Left: “Sometimes I feel like a sign board.” A Kenyan professional, working at a Western NGO, tells what it’s like: Pointing the way for an ever-changing succession of ex-pats who are paid much more, but don’t know what to do.
Right: The UN for sale. UNESCO invites corporations to pay up, so they can benefit from its “reputable brand,” while small countries sell their UN vote. Who pays the price for this corruption? Just who you’d expect.
Left: Why do U.N. agencies fabricate data? Other stories show how they do so. Here we look at why. This data isn’t used for planning. Rather, it’s a means of controlling social policies in the global South.
Right: Cooking the numbers. 59% of 10-year-olds in Senegal can’t read, says a UN-World Bank report. Actually, the number is only about 7%. After denying the problem, now the global agencies exaggerate it. There’s a reason.
Left: Groupthink has led to many disasters — from burning down ancient peat forests, to compelling children in the South to attend schools where they learn nothing. Groupthink helps the aid industry stay in business.
Right: USAID funds a new education program in Pakistan. But the problem isn’t a lack of funding, the problem is that those who should be improving schools, are instead keeping an eye on the money.
Left: The UN Global Goals: What’s missing? The UN has 17 development goals with 169 targets. But a lot is missing. For starters: anything that would cut into corporate profits.
Right: Fudging the numbers. U.N.-FAO hunger data abruptly changed in 2012. Why? In 2015, the U.N. needed to show great success for its Millennium Development Goals.
Left: Book dumping. The U.S. Navy gives books to schoolchildren in Nigeria. It seems nice. But (brace yourself, this isn’t pretty) they’re handing out leftover Florida test preparation manuals.
Right: Masters of Deceit. Raising funds for “girls’ education” has become big business…. and remarkably often, the aid industry has crossed the line into deceit and dishonesty.
Left: Chocolate hands. You can buy chocolate hands at shops in Antwerp. So what? Well, one of the colonial era’s great atrocities involves Belgians chopping off the hands of Africans.
Right: How aid undermines education. Too many children in developing countries enter secondary school unable to read their own name. It wasn’t always this way. Here’s how self-serving Western aid has contributed to illiteracy.
Left: Selling good karma. Aid, in theory, is about helping others. But to a very large extent, it’s about purchasing permission to feel good about ourselves while ignoring unpleasant realities. Want proof? Ask the birds.
Right: Libraries that don’t work: Big NGOs tend to focus on appearance over substance. One result — libraries filled with the wrong books — undermines education in Africa. Karim F Hirji describes what he’s seen in Tanzania.
Left: Where did the aid money go? After East Timor won independence in 2002, it received massive amounts of aid money. Where did it all go? Timor activists investigated.
Right: Schooling vs. education. The United Nations has convinced much of the developing world that getting more children enrolled in school is the same as expanding education. The consequences have been devastating.
Left: The brain drain. Colonial relationships are about extraction – of many varieties. As the coronavirus pandemic spread, wealthier countries extracted a particularly valuable resource from the others: Doctors.
Right: Attitudes of racial superiority: Westerners tend to perceive aid as an act of generosity. But in Africa and Asia, our poll found that an overwhelming majority saw it as rooted in attitudes of racial superiority.
Left: Schools in the global South are getting worse. The aid industry doesn’t ask why, and for good reason. It created much of the problem.
Right: Branding by UNICEF. More and more children display UNICEF-branded knapsacks as they walk to and from school. Does this improve the quality of their education? Or does it just increase the value of the UNICEF brand?
Left: What do your schools focus on? We polled people in 15 diverse countries. A decisive majority said their schools primarily teach children to pass tests.
Right: Effective altruism says that more data-based evidence will result in better foreign aid. The evidence suggests otherwise.
Left: The Shadow Government. UNICEF produces reports for weak governments to publish as their own. This makes the government look productive while hiding the extent to which UNICEF, like any colonial power, is pulling the strings.
Right: Do African perspectives matter? The Global Partnership for Education shapes education policy in 70 countries, mostly in Africa and Asia. Its CEO, chair, and 7-member evaluation team are from the USA, Australia, and Europe.
Left: Can aid be decolonized? Many people have proposed ways to address flaws in the aid system. It doesn’t happen, because the system is ALREADY working well — for those in charge. Here’s a look at why reform efforts won’t work.
Right: Cheerleader for karma colonialism. Paternalism, gullibility, and a shallow perspective…. N.Y. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is a leading pundit on aid issues, but he brings all the wrong qualities to the job.
Left: The Pandemic and the Debt Trap: The IMF and World Bank want to use the pandemic to draw developing regions deeper into a debt trap. Most countries in the South are refusing.
Right: Does the Unesco Institute of Statistics actually understand statistics? There’s good reason to be dubious. But it produces the numbers that the U.N. uses to plan education and health policy.
Left: Out of thin air. The UNESCO Institute for Statistics produces lots of data. But based on what? UIS issues education statistics for the 47-country region of sub-Saharan Africa — but it has data for only 4 of the countries.
Right: A License to Meddle: Different students choose different subjects. Does this really call for U.N. intervention? Or is it just a License to Meddle?
Left: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation vows transparency. But its database search function is broken. How hard is Bill trying?
Right: Snake oil. Many Western NGOs will say pretty much anything to get your donation. We examine Save the Children’s claim that an extra year of school will bring great wage increases. It’s snake oil. But it brings in donations.
Left: AidSpeak: The U.N. and NGOs talk of being “transformative.” In doing so, they reveal the arrogance and top-down mentality behind their smooth facades.
Right: Voluntourism sounds like an opportunity to feel good and do good. But the agencies selling these trips prioritize the “feel good” half and nobody really wants to think to carefully about the impact on those at the other end.
Left: The Global Partnership for Education announced a recent grant with this photograph of schoolgirls marching in lockstep. Did they learn anything? Can they even read? GPE doesn’t know. What does it think ‘education’ is about?
Right: Junk data. A lot of numbers published by the U.N. and aid agencies are garbage. It’s useful to understand why they are so motivated to publish such data.
Left: Proud graduates, No jobs. Institutions with no accountability generally do a bad job. By giving out scholarships in developing regions, NGOs make schools worse.
Right: The campaign against reading. The aid industry says it promotes reading. But its actions — such as dumping unwanted books from the USA — are motivated by self-interest, and consistently undermine reading in the global South.
Left: The high cost of meddling. Aid organizations claim they want to “fix” problems, but they’re really driven to create jobs for themselves, while pleasing foreign donors. They end up meddling, and it carries a high cost.
Right: It’s all about control. Development aid is a continuation of colonialism by other means. If that sounds far-fetched, this story in The Africa Report presents six strong pieces of evidence,

Other stories about karma colonialism

Left: “Will they just spend it on beer?” Instead of aid funds going to governments and NGOs, why not give it directly to the poor? Here are answers to common questions about cash transfer programs.
Right: Why not just give them the money? Cash transfers — just giving aid money directly to those you wish to help — has a proven track record. Why does the aid industry dislike this approach?
Left: What would make a better future? There are ways that wealthier countries can genuinely help others, if they want to. Give the aid money directly to the poor, for example. Here are ideas.
Right: Willful blindness. As it tries to control school policies in the global South, the aid industry has data about every subject except one: Are students learning anything? It doesn’t want to know.
Trojan Horse outside a gate
Left: Schooling for Colonialism. UNICEF claims it will “transform” lives through education. Instead, it pushes poor children into rote-based schools, transforming many into dutiful subjects for a neo-colonial world.
Right: Trojan Aid. The Trojans learned long ago that generous-looking gifts may just cause trouble. This 2-minute video shows how foreign aid pursues the same broad goals as colonialism of the past, but with a friendly-looking face.