When aid fails: Power, politics, and the price of good intentions

International aid was meant to heal broken economies and build fairer societies. Yet decades and billions later, the results remain uneven, often entangled in politics, flawed incentives, and misplaced priorities. In this wide-ranging conversation with Coordinates, development economist Dr. Emily Brearley speaks about the moral contradictions of aid, the misplaced faith in technology, and what it would take to rebuild development from the ground up

Dr. Emily Brearley

Dr Brearley is a development economist with extensive experience in social and political economy, has recently published Aid Inferno. The book offers a candid examination of the effectiveness and efficiency of international development aid, with particular focus on land administration and the World Bank’s role in shaping it. Drawing on her years of work with the World Bank across multiple regions, Dr Brearley brings an insider’s perspective to the complex interplay of policy, power, and practice in global development. Originally from the United Kingdom, she is now based in Latin America.

1. What personal experiences made you begin to question the real purpose or impact of international aid?

I am cognizant that N=1 is anecdote who cares what I think? In the end, only robust data should carry intellectual weight. In truth, I always questioned the aid business because I was raised in a single parent household in the Thatcher years. We worried about money and the National Healthcare Service. We had a natural mistrust for anything that smacked of international and elite. Ironically, I would educate myself out of my social class and country, but I still went to egg-throwing protests when I moved to Washington D.C. because I felt in my tummy that the World Bank was a bad place. It was only when I got a job there—by cheekily writing to the Chief Economist and demanding he hire beyond the usual silver spoon connected elites—that I stopped questioning a little bit. I liked first class travel; all you can eat breakfast buffets and incredible access to the World’s governments. I desperately wanted to make the world a better place and thought I could do so if I worked hard and kept my head down. But my conscience woulnd’t let me ignore reality for long. In the book I provide a professional, yet accessible critique of aid, based on robust quantitative and qualitative data—I stand on the shoulders of development economics greats

2. You write that “the aid business pretended to care.” In your view, where did global aid go most fundamentally wrong? Is it the design, intent, or incentives?

In contrast to my rabble-rousing younger self, I now believe that the intentions of global aid were altruistic and practical— you can’t trade with broken countries, and better off countries are less likely to go to war. It was the simplistic and overly optimistic conception of economic development (as enshrined in the Harrod Domar growth model) that proved to be a fatal design flaw—as economist Bill Easterly has pointed out ad nauseum while cashing his fat World Bank pension, dishing out cash to poor countries doesn’t automatically make them rich. The World Bank’s lack of humility and overweening desire for self-perpetuation created a web of warped incentives to obscure its failure, reward and promote those staff most likely to lie on its behalf, and ensure that developing country governments that squander loans on white elephant projects or weaponry rather than invest it in schools and hospitals, go undetected.

3. The World Bank stands at the centre of your critique. Do you see its failings as unique to the institution, or as a reflection of the broader global financial system?

The World Bank IS the center of the development business because it has the most money and power. It is the Big Brother, with sister regional organizations (the Inter-American Development, Asian Development Bank, AfDB, EBRD etc.) and the sun around which most International NGOs revolve. Thus, just like in Star Wars, if you can pierce the Death Star with a well-aimed critique, the whole rotten development infrastructure will implode.

4. Your Malawi case study is striking. Why do you think land—so central to wealth, dignity, and power— has been consistently neglected or mishandled in development policy?

Slaying the dragon of unequal land distribution would have taken the type of courage the Bank never had. One of my favourite dinner party quotes is that on the eve of the Mexican revolution, the majority of North Americans owned land, and the vast majority of Mexicans did NOT. Our Western liberal order is built on equal land distribution— indeed the louche French cowboy economist Thomas Piketty has shown that land distribution after war leads to fairer societies. Land is the central development issue and the most concentrated asset, and so the World Bank, which never had much persuasive power over public policy didn’t dare touch this third rail issue for fear it would undermine its longevity.

5. Tell us about the aid sector’s fascination with geospatial technology and the assumptions that costly mapping projects replace real reform.

Look, I am an economist, not a software engineer. But I contend that most land issues could have been resolved with free Google Earth maps and a simple tenure process. The reason why governments don’t ask for this is because they don’t want to upset the power elites who keep them in office and donations. And the reason why the World Bank has pumped so much money—money that was borrowed in the name of the poorest people on earth—into tech that tends to break down, lose its expensive license after a year and ultimately become abandoned—is because it looks legit but is actually a bottomless pit of never ending loans. Every land specialist at the Bank knows this, the great and good who attend the yearly “Land Conference” know this and my illiterate farmer clients from Malawi to Guatemala, know this.

6. How do you respond to those who believe imperfect aid is still better than none at all?

Show me. Don’t tell me, show me with robust third-party data… I’m waiting!

7. You advocate for rescuing economics “from the neoclassical zealots.” Please elaborate.

Economics is the language of power, and I want young people to study it, instead of taking those useless non STEM courses with “studies” in the title. If you can’t understand how the economy is run, you’re at a distinct disadvantage. Sadly, because the neoclassical one-note economists over egged the pudding, a lot of young people were put off the discipline because they believe it is synonymous with a type of capitalism that impoverishes people and the planet. They aren’t taught that capitalism has been the greatest poverty-buster in history, and that it comes in many different f lavours. We should see economics as a toolkit not a canon of rigid beliefs.

8. Do you think that development can be done differently? If yes, what are your suggestions?

Yes! Development 2.0 will be done differently. My elevator pitch to my new unsuspecting new boss U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is: reduce the mission creep at the World Bank to focus only on that which is simple, transparent and doable (we have 80 years of data and shouldn’t ignore it like goldfish). Bessent already understands that trade is more important than aid; and I would also like a renewed focus on banking transparency.

9. You ask, “Are we humans simply too selfish to really care about one another?” Has your answer changed after writing Aid Inferno?

I have always been an optimistic realist. When I worked in Ethiopia and was dealing with my own fair share of World Bank shenanigans, a brilliant physician and public servant came to speak at a brown bag lunch series I had organized. The story of how her family had been persecuted during the Derg, and her persistence in her studies and career despite this, left a deep impression on me. I asked her how she managed to find the strength to keep going, to keep the faith and fight for her clients. She leaned forward, her beautiful heart-shaped face and intelligent wide brown eyes glistening with power and said “Don’t Quit!”.

An Excerpt from AID INFERNO by EJ Brearley

Muli Bwanji1

Perhaps the most cynical stance by the World Bank is to completely ignore the most important determinant of wealth: Land. Classical economics views land as a commodity to be bought and sold on a functional market. It doesn’t care about the emotional impact that land might have on its owner, or the more common feeling, of always being beholden to someone else for simply existing with two feet on the ground and having a bed to sleep in at night. It also doesn’t care how the land was acquired or consider whether the set up was fair in the first place—remember those Monopoly games where a few select players started with more money and got two throws of the dice instead of one? That is the history of land ownership in a nutshell.

The only type of economists who had a lot to say about land distribution were the communists. Unfortunately, their poor historical track record was such that those ideas were banished; baby thrown well and truly out with the bathwater. This allowed capitalism to forget about history and this goldfish economics allowed World Bankers to studiously avoid any mention of the history of land acquisition and its skewed distribution. The focus was strictly on the purchase and management of land on the “market.” But this approach assumed a level playing f ield that didn’t exist, and a functioning market where there was none.

In developing countries, just like pre industrial Europe, a few elites tend to own everything. The World Bank would claim this reality had nothing to do with them—they focused on economics, not politics, but we all know that it’s impossible to disentangle the two. This aversion to historical precedent and its manifestation in the distribution of land assets in the present, means the Bank should have stayed out of the sector entirely. Unfortunately, it couldn’t resist, because lending to a sector that is inherently corrupt and can therefore absorb huge amounts of cash, proved to be a lucrative revenue stream.

I saw this first hand when I worked for the World Bank’s land unit. I was tasked by the Bolivian director to write a book on the history of the institution’s land projects, detailing all the loans that had been extended over seventy years, across seven geographical regions of the world. Although his goal was primarily self-aggrandizement by means of a glowing review of his own projects, it seemed possible that one might skilfully but gently weave in some lessons learned, between the lines.

I spoke to long-retired economists who had begun their careers at the Bank from its inception and had to a man (and one woman) finally retired on good pensions with heavy hearts. Their efforts to work on meaningful land reform had all been thwarted by Management in their telling. Like many parts of the World Bank, the Land sector was one where the people who cared the most and possessed the requisite expertise had ended up leaving in frustration. I spoke to government ministers and to community leaders, to academics and journalists. I even spoke to Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto who was having a sexy moment back then, thanks to his best seller, The Mystery of Capital, which focused on the importance of land rights as a foundation for economic development. This was one of the central features of the Washington Consensus, and it certainly was not wrong. However, the proposed ‘fix’ in the Consensus was this pesky little term: “market-based reform.” But when land has been unfairly concentrated in the first place, there is no functioning ‘market’, and resistance to any reform is strong among those who consider the land theirs by divine right.

Since the land unit was too timid to talk about the structure of land ownership, it had instead focused on the mapping digitization of land registries that existed only on paper, or not at all. The logic of all of this was that it would help the government tax the land—a primary source of income for rich countries; and it would facilitate the smooth sale and purchase of land and property assets. Unfortunately, by relying on the invisible hand and what the more cynical of us dubbed “Magic Tech,” the World Bank achieved very little in terms of tangible results. That is because the core issue at the heart of land ownership was ignored: the social contract between the government, private sector and the general populace regarding who should own the land and what they should do with it.

When I visited African land ministries, I would often be directed to a big storage cupboard, where enormous dusty maps the size of ping-pong tables were piled high, stacked from wall to wall, a fire hazard in waiting. The software the Bank had pushed was too expensive to update and had been abandoned. These projects had also been shelved because it was too politically risky to give a clear picture of who owned what. Chaos served those elites who didn’t want to pay land taxes or give the public easily accessible information. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent on digitization as the panacea also ignored the brilliant freebie of Google Earth, an online resource with sufficient resolution to do the job perfectly adequately. There was a lot of talk about the marvels of blockchain, and how it could fix the land registry problem by making digital records accessible to all. It indeed could have, but only if there was an interest in making large property owners pay taxes—those same folks who funded elections. Today, in most developing countries there remains no functioning property map/cadastre, and this is by design, not by accident.

Of the dozens of projects that I reviewed from across the globe for the book, only one had been successful under extraordinarily tragic circumstances. This story was related to me by an Aussie buddy and mentor, who hadn’t just taken the red pill but would deal them out to disillusioned junior economists when they came to his door crying. Windows were sealed shut at the World Bank for a reason. He was one of those noble professionals who tried to do his best, using deep technical knowledge, within a system that would constantly try to reject and eject him. He had been part of a team to assist the Indonesian province of Aceh after it had suffered from the devastating Tsunami in 2004. An estimated twenty percent of its small island population had been killed in the devastating disaster, with people and property records washed away. Locals decided to rebuild their land maps and rights from scratch. This process was achieved quickly and efficiently, with a fraction of the usual fuss and cost, by using female community leaders to walk the land boundaries with surveyors who would then record the precincts on a map. How painful and utterly surreal that only after such a catastrophic disaster, should things be a little fairer.

As I spoke to an increasingly disgruntled number of people about the failures of World Bank land projects, I realized that I was never going to be able to show the book to my boss, since he would surely hate its whistlestop tour of World Bank land sector disasters— using ideology and wishful thinking to address the most intractable development issue est.1944. Then, what happened in Malawi rendered all this mute.

I was sent to the landlocked East African country of around twenty million people in 2013 to review a “best-practice” World Bank land reform project. My boss had designed it, and he had also decided that it was “best practice.” He wanted this project to be the poster child for the land book and therefore a means to propel his career. When I looked at the Bank’s track record in the country, I could see that millions of dollars had already been spent to banish poverty. The land sector had been a hub of activity for many donors, and hundreds of millions of dollars had already been spent to digitize the land records of this small country, which was the size of the state of Pennsylvania. Yet in every cadastre office I visited, even in the capital Lilongwe, there was no sign of digitization in progress. Instead, those familiar vast rooms with stacks of old physical records formed the basis of the controlled chaos of the country’s cadastre. Like a pile of treasure maps waiting to be discovered, it was impossible for the average citizen to find out who owned the country they lived in or the land they farmed. No one was in a great rush to render transparent and searchable Malawi’s heavily skewed land distribution, whereby a couple of rich white families, military members and politicians had secured ninety-nine-year leases from the government on vast tracts they no longer farmed or had ever paid taxes on.

Like so many other cases I had seen and heard about, expensive software had been purchased but was so complicated to install that by the time anyone had f igured out how to digitize a single page, the license had run out. It’s also the case that money designated for sophisticated software is particularly prone to go missing, since absolutely everyone involved has an incentive to keep the music playing before anyone must find a chair to sit down on. People expect computers to glitch and software to scramble, so it’s a great way to lose money without questions being asked.

This was only the beginning. The most cynical component of the vast Malawi land loan was about to be revealed as I set out on field trips to far flung rural communities. I was about to discover the true horror of the Malawi Community Based Rural Land Development Project— a delightful sounding name to which no one could possibly object. Initiated in 2004, this part of the loan supported a negotiated community-based land acquisition and development pilot, which included 15,000 land-poor households in a half dozen communities scattered across the sun bleached, barren interior. The ‘negotiation’ between the most powerful people in the country and its illiterate smallholder farmers was described as “transparent, voluntary, legal, and resource-supported.” The “anything but Zimbabwe” approach meant that the Bank would ensure these land purchases were ruled by a fair market price, which would be covered by a public loan and repaid by future generations of Malawians.

The case of Zimbabwe was notorious. A country that had rejected the “market” mantra and took matters into its own hands when compensation from the Brits hadn’t materialized as promised. In the early 2000s, then-President Robert Mugabe had evicted four thousand white commercial farmers from their largely productive estates. In theory, there was a need to correct the imbalance between black subsistence farmers and the heirs of white colonizers. Tragically in practice, the entire process was carried out with such wanton violence and destruction to property that the agricultural economy—Zim was once the breadbasket of Africa—was decimated. The approach taken by Mugabe gave the West legitimacy to ostracize him. Zimbabwe was shut out of international financial and aid markets for the cheek of reversing a policy of land expropriation using the same tactics as white colonizers. Two wrongs certainly don’t make a right, but the Brits could have avoided all this destruction if they had given Zimbabwe the reparations they had promised. Current President Mnangagwa is taking a less confrontational route that allows for joint partnerships between black and white farmers.2

In Malawi, the gap between the Washington Consensus market model, and the real state of Malawian land rights, was vast. There was no market for land, since only a few international hotels and large businesses in Lilongwe had ever paid land taxes in the country’s history. A market could not exist without a cadastre, or before the country had a proper regulatory and tax infrastructure. This would have been a monumental political shift, and a challenge to the status quo. Quite how to introduce a land tax, when there wasn’t one before, and level it on the very same people who run the country and own the government, is a devilish conundrum. In the U.K., the ancestors of people who were related to Henry VIII, or had romantic dalliances with him, still own a disproportionate amount of land. The U.K. has not had land reform, and it is an old democracy. By contrast, America was built on land reform and retains the dynamic economy and meritocratic labour market that makes it a favoured country for immigration.

In Malawi, while most of the land was still owned by the government, most of it had been leased. However, there was a silver lining to these contracts, and at that moment many of the land leases were coming up for renewal. This meant that the World Bank’s project designers could have simply let the old titles expire and then assist the government in the redistribution of agricultural land to needy subsistence farmers. This approach would not have necessitated a loan of course, but much cheaper technical assistance. And where is the fun in that? The bottom line was the land project responded to the wrong problem with the most expensive solution. The effect of the World Bank loan essentially created a false market price for agricultural land, that would have reverted back to government ownership in its absence.

Tangible proof of this was that each land parcel, regardless of location or productive capacity (the features that usually derive a market price), had sold for a similar price, with the US$40 million World Bank loan simply divided up equally among the lucky few to deceive the many. This was a cynical case of reverse cash transfer. Poor Malawians were being asked to take out a loan to pay the richest people in their country for land that belonged to the people already.

In a country of 4,000,000 hectares of arable land, the project only covered a tiny 22,000 hectares to be distributed among twenty communities which were then supposed to be given a joint land title. They were then required to move from their existing homes and settle the new land parcels, provide farm labour in an equitable fashion, and make the land productive—without transport, health or education infrastructure, or even agricultural extension services. Without anything in fact that would be needed to render the parched earth sitting a BA in agronomy and couldn’t find a job in his field. Aware of the land shenanigans going on his country, he asked the question that I have been posed so many times across at least one hundred countries: why does the World Bank keep supporting corrupt governments? under unpredictable skies, as a reliable source of food or income. Even worse, the dirty secret of the Bank’s land director was that he was too busy taking selfies with government officials and smiling villagers to bother checking on the details of his best practice project. It turns out that none of the communities had received a new title deed from the government—the old ones were about to expire, which left them open to harassment from the previous owners.

We visited site after remote site. Travelling down long dusty roads with only a few lonely baobab trees punctuating the desolate and barren landscape. Malawi is still a predominantly rural country, with over two thirds of the population eking out an existence as subsistence farmers. A precarious and hard scrabble life made only worse by the loss of tree coverage and soil degradation, increased hot days, and intense rainfall spells due to global warming. The leading cause of death in the country is AIDS, but among children it is preventable malaria with one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.

As we arrived in our sparkling white SUVs, villagers thronged outside their wooden shacks, singing to welcome us. Hundreds of little children, tummies bloated with malnourishment, gathered around our vehicles, shyly trying to touch our clothes or hold our hands. We didn’t deserve such warm hospitality. As usual, I let the men in my group engage in the formalities while I slunk off around the side of the huts to sit with the women and hear the real story. In each community I was given a list of all the challenges they were facing under this new land arrangement, item after item. All I could do was write them down on my note pad, and express empathy. Not good at keeping a poker face, one woman even tried to comfort me by saying “well at least you aren’t here to steal our children like Madonna.”

As the 2014 World Cup reached the semi f inal stage, I headed off to the airport in Lilongwe. I was discussing the entire mess with one of the hotel concierges, Gift, who was giving me a lift. He had a BA in agronomy and couldn’t find a job in his field. Aware of the land shenanigans going on his country, he asked the question that I have been posed so many times across at least one hundred countries: why does the World Bank keep supporting corrupt governments?

The answer is because the World Bank is a Bank first, and a development institution a much more distant second, if indeed it ever remembers that part at all. The fundamental purpose of a bank is to lend money. The World Bank knows that it will always get paid back first, because it is often the lender of last resort for countries maxed out and unable to access financial markets. Gift’s final observation was that if Uruguayan footballer Luis Suarez donated his salary to the people of Malawi, then just over eighteen million people could each receive around ten dollars. That would be the equivalent of one bag of maize, enough for two people for two months.

Once back in Washington D.C, I got a panicked call on WhatsApp from a Malawian colleague. Could the World Bank urgently provide security for his team because people in our best practice project were being pushed off their land at gunpoint? Having fobbed off the communities with almost-expired land titles, the former, extremely-well compensated owners were now back with their heavies. Who cared what the so-called government said? They felt that the land was their birth right and since they had a monopoly on violence, they couldn’t be stopped.

When I showed my boss the text messages, he firmly told me that it was not our problem to solve and didn’t renew my contract. Not to be deterred with lives on the line, I went to speak to then-President Jim Kim’s Chief of Staff, to try and get some kind of assistance. Unfortunately, the Big Boss was allegedly far too busy with the kind of extra-curricular entanglement so common of unattractive, powerful men who run international organizations. Obama’s pick to lead the World Bank had proven to be particularly unpopular with staff for his odd policy ideas and brusque, thin-skinned manner. He allegedly had a particular problem with smart women; back in those days we gig workers had devised a black-market bingo card to see which Senior female economist would suspiciously retire for “personal reasons” within a given month.

I even tried to get a British newspaper interested in reporting on the story, but as I had seen all those years before as a Guardian journalist trying to write about Latin American human rights abuses; it just wasn’t deemed interesting unless lots of people were getting killed all at once or a hapless Westerner had been caught in the crossfire—never had I wished for a more dramatic or useful role for our Material Girl Madonna, than in the context of the Malawi Land Fund.

Recently the media platform Devex that focuses on development, wrote about the Malawi Land Project, noting that it had been shut down because “families found the climate too harsh to farm and the area lacked sufficient social infrastructure. Many returned home.”3 Mysteriously, the project documents have been scrubbed from the link in the piece. Meanwhile, the ownership and use of land remains a pivotal development challenge in the country. Malawi’s new president is struggling to balance the potential revenue from international investment in large-scale agriculture, with the need to improve the lives of young people.

Endnotes