The Failure Of World Bank’s Aid To Africa With The Case Study Of Chad-Cameron Pipeline Project

The effectiveness of the foreign aid from international organizations has long been an academic and political debate. Western countries have a history of more than half a century’s aid. At different times, under different situation, aid recipients and policy are different. Because Africa is still suffering from poverty, hunger, famine and conflict, it has been the main target of foreign aid. The biggest international aid agency is the World Bank, it currently has two ambitious goals:to end extreme poverty in a generation’s time, and promote common prosperity. But Africa, after decades of aid, remains to be the poorest continent. Compared with the massive aid given to it, Africa’s development is not optimistic at all. Corrupted political system, sluggish economy, and poor governance characterize this continent. The huge financial assistance has shown little use at all.The purpose of this paper is to analysis the result of World Bank’s assistance to Africa. First of all, through the description of the World Bank’s history of assistance to Africa since1945, I summarize World Bank’s different policy priorities and methods during different periods. Based on this, I summed up the reasons of the Bank’s poor performance, which include the following three main points. First, the World Bank’s assistance to Africa has relatively harsh conditions, Africa cannot exercise their subjective initiative to make full use of money from it. Second, the World Bank’s policy is not exactly the same with the local conditions. During the specific implementation of the project, because of the special circumstances, the risks failed to be forecasted often bring disastrous effects. Finally, because of the characteristic of the African countries themselves, external intervention nature of aid will usually increase the adversity. In order to fully illustrate these points, I used the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project as example, the largest one in the history of the World Bank assistance. Through the analysis of the detailed project failure, it confirms my previous analysis to be correct and reasonable.