I asked myself why this title? The back page said it all adequately: and it served as an appetiser causing me to lay my hands on the book and review it. Because I, too, subscribe to the position that foreign aid has failed us by adopting development models that are largely inappropriate for our place and time and seem as if they have been designed in Washington DC to serve the interests of industrial nations.

 The most glaring example was when we were ‘ forced’, as it were, to adopt liberalisation, privatisation and structural adjustment, pursued relentlessly since 1990. When the Maoists withdrew from the parliamentary system and declared war on the state in 1996, the proponents of structural adjustment completely ignored the vital need to, then onwards, incorporate internal and external security—national security— into the development paradigm.

 It needs to be emphasised that privatisation gave rise to unprecedented political corruption with the sale of the state’s assets, which further fuelled Maoism. Worse: it reduced national think tanks into contract research centres doing their bidding and sapped the national capacity for creativity and innovation within the fragile bureaucracy by making it a dependent aid fiefdom.

Furthermore, the top-down project and programme interventions drawn up by external consultants without the participation of the executives concerned, thus reducing  the target groups  to objects rather than subjects were, more often than not, the root cause of aid failure.

All this project designing completely ignored the gross instability in the bureaucracy, as it was commonplace that a project was drawn up at one time and then, when finalised, was executedby another short-term bureaucrat with no idea of the process. The best example that comes to mind is the USD 3 million financial manuals designed for Nepal Electricity Authority landing up in the waste paper basket, so to speak.

The author, Claude Bobillier, was born in the Swiss Alps but never felt at home there. He left for New Zealand where he spent his young adult years struggling, to be rewarded eventually by a doctorate from London and a career in the field of education and human development. And here is the punch line: he served 27 years working in 30 countries in Asia and Africa advising “corrupt and incompetent governments and arrogant western aid bureaucracies” which have permitted him to “witness first-hand the scandals and failures of foreign aid”. I thought to myself that 30 countries in 27 years is a veritable kaleidoscope of technical development assistance — hence the reference to circus? One can’t help stress here how a Nordic country working in Bangladesh, assisting in the education sectors for mass education, chose to ignore reports from its own expert that most of the USD 60 million invested in the project was being syphoned off for personal use. Details of the embezzlement were ignored by the donor!

Dr Bobillier also cites the case of Cambodia where the Khmer Project Director recruited an incompetent Indian consultant in exchange for a share of his salary!

He visualises Nepal as a failed state after decades of development. The failure is accounted for by lack of political will and vision, as well as incompetence. Connivance with donors who wished to put into effect their pet projects was quite prevalent and the civil service cadres were mere passive recipients. He also witnessed NGOs run indirectly by ministers and political leaders. No wonder NGOs in Nepal as in other developing countries are no more than quasi NGOs (QuaNGOs) or PONGOs—politically owned NGOs.

This compact book of 147 pages has a foreword by Greta Rana who thinks that Bobillier’s book provides a much needed frank, frontal assault on foreign aid. Yes, Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty gave us much food for thought, she remarks, but it lacked ‘a requisite passion’. She feels Claude Bobillier offers this passion in his book.

The book is an autobiographical memoir that straddles his childhood; reminiscences drawn from his native Switzerland during WWII when Switzerland displayed “many of the characteristics of an underdeveloped country”. We get to appreciate the hardships and challenges in his village and the defects in the education system, which led him to his passion to change society, especially the education sector; and to help the poor, the underprivileged and the socially oppressed. His PhD was in education sociology.

The significant lesson from Africa is that, without the emancipation of women, no country will be able to eradicate poverty and enjoy political stability and socio-economic transformation. He found African society deeply patriarchal with men refusing to allow projects to empower women.

He insists that the term ‘foreign aid’ should be changed to ‘mutual cooperation’ to introduce a sense of partnership. He calls for gradual abandonment of government-to-government aid to ‘direct aid’ to NGOs and local communities.

Here I would prefer even more ‘direct aid’ by depositing the money due to the beneficiaries into their own bank accounts leaving them to choose which schools to send their children to, or which health providers to use, so that development is turned around to being demand led rather than supply led within a regime of markets and competition amongst suppliers to honour consumer choice.

 I had propounded this as early as 1985 in a seminar about alternative models of development after Nepal initiated liberalisation in 1982. Now with banking expanded and with mobile banking to boot it is a desirable necessity for the financial inclusion of the poor as India under PM Modi has demonstrated successfully.

  Interestingly, the author admires the phenomenal development achievements of his native country, Switzerland. Nevertheless, he shows greater preference for his second home country, New Zealand, as the model country for the world to emulate on account of its egalitarianism and fairness.

  Switzerland, he feels, needs to face up to the ugly realities of its banking sector along with anti-poor policies by food corporations like Nestle, as well as chemical corporations. I fully agree with him regarding the arrogance and suspicion of foreigners amidst the Swiss. This is the impression I had when I lived two years as a graduate student in Geneva University although, fortunately, I had much access to Swiss families and felt welcome always.

Effective local governments and the dire necessity of political decentralisation to bring about development participation are wonderful lessons we can draw from Switzerland. However, we also learn from New Zealand how under a unitary system of government we can have similar decentralisation benefits albeit by relying on markets as avenues of change and development. If he prefers the New Zealand model over the Swiss model perhaps it is because of the arrogance, greed and rapacity in Switzerland compared to New Zealand. Of course neither are perfect states he says. 

To be perfect, he asserts, one needs to develop our societies with values such as fairness, solidarity, compassion and tolerance.

     Not all aid fails. Projects run in true partnership with women’s groups, genuine NGOs, associations and user groups tend to succeed as they seek self-reliance amongst the beneficiaries. South India’s Rishi Valley Educational Centre is cited as a model project with magnificent success. It has succeeded in showing the world how learning can be fulfilling and transformational and a joy as well as an effective tool for poverty eradication.

The author also cites the women’s associations of Senegal and Burkina Faso as success cases in informal, formal and non-formal education. They made illiterate women into an ‘un-stoppable force’ of development. Similar things have happened with Nepal Mothers’ Clubs and User Groups, which were indigenous organisational and social innovations.