We’re Not Poor! The Real Debate Isn’t About Aid - It’s About Power
Photo by Alice Pasqual
In recent years, demands to shift the power in international aid have gained momentum.
Organizations and activists across the Global South are rightly demanding that funding go directly to local actors. The argument is both urgent and legitimate: we are the ones doing the work, living the realities, understanding the histories, and carrying the burdens. We are best placed to lead the solutions that affect our own communities. Yet too often, funding is still passed through INGOs that act as intermediaries, absorbing overhead and legitimacy before any resources reach the grassroots movements actually doing the work.
This critique rooted in the lived experience of racism, white saviorism, and donor-driven agendas is long overdue. It exposes the deep imbalances in a system where resources, decisions, and narratives have been controlled by actors far removed from the people they claim to serve. But while this reckoning is necessary, it is not sufficient.
If we stop at “fund the local,” we risk falling into a trap: asking for inclusion within a system built on the very extraction and inequality we claim to challenge. We risk reinforcing the machinery, rather than transforming it. Pouring funds into local hands won’t change the game if the rules are still written elsewhere.
we also must resist the romanticization of "local”. Local elites can be just as disconnected, extractive, and donor-aligned as international ones. What matters is not only where the money goes, but whose values it carries and whose interests it serves.
The central question here would be not who receives aid, but why we need it in the first place?
The answer lies in centuries of extraction and dispossession. According to Action Aid report over three-quarters of all lower-income countries spend more on foreign debt than on their own healthcare systems and more than half spend more on debt servicing than education[1]. The Democratic Republic of Congo for example, despite being rich in cobalt and coltan, critical minerals powering the global tech industry, remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with over 70% of its population living on less than $2.15 a day[2]. Not because of a lack of resources, but because its vast mineral wealth fuels global tech industries while local communities are displaced, exploited, or caught in cycles of violence.
In Niger, uranium lights French homes while local communities live in darkness[3].These are not unfortunate side effects of globalization, they are its design.
In its relentless competition for funding, the development sector often loses sight of the deeper question: are we chasing money, or are we working for justice? And yet, all this competition revolves around a very small pot. Official aid accounts for just 0.33% of global income in donor countries[4].
Those 0.33% that Western governments cry over, threaten to cut, or dress up as generosity it’s a drop in the ocean compared to what they spend on military budgets and trade subsidies. And let’s be clear: it will never bring justice in a world where weapons get more funding than climate, where colonial debt remains unpaid, and where trade deals keep the South locked in structural dependence. Real justice demands more than aid, it demands reparations, deep restructuring, and the courage to imagine something radically different.
This brings us to one of the most uncomfortable truths: the aid system often distracts from the real flow of money and turns a blind eye to how that money was extracted in the first place. While donors pledge millions in humanitarian assistance, billions are extracted through debt repayments, tax avoidance, and trade imbalances. The war economies of Libya, the Sahel and other parts of the world are not just zones of chaos, they are zones of profit. Armed conflict provides the cover for the unregulated extraction of oil, gold, lithium, and rare earth minerals.
We’re not poor. We are being looted and too often, it’s with the help of our own: a self-serving political class and undemocratic governments. The truth is, we’ve got our own laundry to wash, but that’s a whole other article.
So If we want to talk about money and if we really serious about shifting power, let’s talk about where it goes? and who benefits. Let’s talk about how climate finance is framed as generosity rather than repayment. Let’s talk about the cost of being governed by a global financial architecture we had no hand in designing.
To move forward, we must do more than demand a seat at the table. We must ask whether the table should exist at all, and then, we must build our own. Shifting the power isn't just about asking for a bigger share; it's about reclaiming what has always been ours. It’s not about improving aid, it’s about ending the need for it. A just world should not rely on intermediaries for people to live with dignity.
Let’s move with strategy and grace, not from a place of scarcity, but from a deep sense of abundance, dignity, and memory: the memory that mutual aid, solidarity, and care have always existed in our communities. These are not imported values; they are legacies we carry.
We’re done scrambling for crumbs beneath systems built to feed others first. We are contesting for the whole cake and for the power to bake our own.
Ikram Ben Said,
Feminist - Co-Founder of New Visions
[2] Congo's coltan miners dig for world's tech — and struggle regardless of who is in charge | AP News
[3] Niger-France relations: Nuclear giant Orano loses control of uranium operations to junta
[4] Preliminary Official Development Assistance (ODA) Levels in 2024 - Hellenic Aid
