Aid and reform in Africa: lessons from ten case studies

This article explores comparatively, the effect and effectiveness of aid in different African countries (10 case studies).More specifically the article investigates the following questions:are there common characteristics of successful and failed reformers that enable us to understand better the political economy of reform?do donors tailor their assistance to different types of countries and to different phases in the reform process, or just provide undifferentiated assistance?have large amounts of financial aid to countries with poor policy sustained the bad policies?has aid played a useful role in the successful reformers? If so, how?The article finds that:policy formation is primarily driven by domestic political economy. Countries that have truly severe economic and political crises (Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) tend to move to the extremes, either developing coherent reform movements or declining rapidlysuccessful reformers have consultative processes that build consensus for change. However, in this sample there is no relationship between formal democratic institutions and good economic policylarge amounts of aid to countries with bad policy sustained those poor policies. The funding allowed the delay of reform. Attaching conditions to the aid in these cases has not successfully led to policy change, nor has it delayed the disbursement of fundsaid played a significant and positive role in the two sustained reformers (Ghana, Uganda). It helped with ideas, though in both cases there was also strong local talent formulating policy. In these cases, finance grew as policy improved and increased the benefits of reform, helping to sustain political supportin general, donors have not discriminated effectively among different countries and different phases of the reform process [author]