Does foreign aid strengthen democracy or undermine political accountability? Political scientist Ryan Jablonski joins Dan Banik to explore how foreign aid shapes elections, influences politicians and voters, and transforms the relationship between democracy and development in aid-dependent countries.
What if foreign aid is not just funding development, but also shaping who wins elections and who holds political power? As governments across the world reconsider their foreign aid commitments, an important question deserves greater attention: Does foreign aid strengthen democracy, or does it undermine political accountability?
In this episode, Dan Banik speaks with Ryan Jablonski, Associate Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and author of Dependency Politics: How Foreign Aid Shapes Electoral Behavior (Cambridge University Press, 2026).
Drawing on extensive research in Malawi and other aid-dependent democracies, Ryan challenges conventional assumptions about foreign aid, corruption, and political accountability. Their conversation explores how politicians negotiate with international donors and NGOs, why voters reward politicians who attract development projects, and how foreign assistance influences electoral competition and government legitimacy.
They also examine the growing influence of China and other emerging donors, the consequences of declining Western aid, and the difficult trade-offs between development effectiveness and democratic accountability.
At the heart of the discussion is a fundamental question: How can foreign aid help countries deliver essential public services while also strengthening democratic institutions and ensuring that governments remain accountable to their citizens?
[Dan Banik]
Ryan, I'm a huge fan of your work. Congrats on this fantastic book you've written. Welcome to the show.
[Ryan Jablonski]
Thank you, Dan. It's really a pleasure. I'm a fan of your work and a fan of this podcast. So, it's really an honor to be part of this.
[Dan Banik]
When you think about this debate, this very polarized debate on foreign aid, not least in the UK, but in most European capitals and also in the US with the dismantling of USAID, what would you say to a skeptic who tells you that aid just fuels corruption and is not effective? Can you make a persuasive case, Ryan, that aid is good for development?
[Ryan Jablonski]
It's a great question. And in part, this book was inspired by a frustration I've had with a lot of social scientists that have approached foreign aid through a very critical lens and said, aid is bad because it undermines accountability of the state. It undermines taxation. It means that people are suddenly looking to donors or NGOs instead of governments as a way to deliver services.
And this doesn't really align with what I've seen in the countries that I've worked in since I've been looking at foreign aid, which is that democracy is very resilient. The governments are actually trying to work closely with donors and voters are trying to hold politicians accountable for how they work with donors.
And I show in the book, for instance, if you talk to politicians and ask, "What have you done for your constituents lately?" Very often, particularly in a place like Malawi that has been so aid-dependent, the answer is, "I worked with such-and-such NGO to build this water point for my community." And that tells us there is a kind of local ownership even in a very aid-dependent place like Malawi, with high levels of corruption and low state capacity. There is a lot of local ownership.
Voters care about what donors do. Politicians care about what donors do. So, I push back on that kind of critical argument that this is really undermining ownership and undermining governance. There is some of that still that goes on, but I think that's oftentimes overplayed. And then I think the other side is I don't think people always realize how important donors are for essential services.
So if we look at Malawi, for instance, almost all HIV services, a lot of maternal health services, a lot of tuberculosis services, a lot of malaria services are funded by donors. And donors are not just providing the drugs. They often have the trucks delivering the services. They have people there providing capacity, training the nurses and doctors.
And so, I think my argument would be there's a big capacity gap that donors are filling. It's quite important, particularly in the near term. I think what's happened recently is one of the worst aspects of what has happened with USAID, and to some extent the cuts from the FCDO in the UK, is how rapidly it has happened. We have essential services that governments are simply not capable of providing at present.
[Dan Banik]
If you think about the relationship between aid and development on the one hand and aid and democracy promotion or elections on the other, if you look at the latest Afrobarometer findings, surveys, et cetera, when African citizens are asked, "What is it that you want?" They want jobs. They want development. They don't say, "We want democracy." They are very supportive of democracy, but often they're not very pleased with what democracy has given them. So, it becomes more about development.
The question I have for you is: should we even be talking about aid and elections and democracy? Or shouldn't we just be thinking about whether aid promotes development? That is the fundamental problem. That is the challenge. We want to see poverty reduction. Does it matter that by doing so, it is also strengthening elections and democracy?
[Ryan Jablonski]
I think that's a great question. And I think it's provocative, certainly in the sense that this has been, if not the explicit, then the implicit assumption of a lot of donors and NGOs. What we care about is development as a technocratic process. We want to maximize the number of vaccines given and reduce poverty. My pushback on that is to say, if we want governance systems to work well, we need to think about how democracy functions.
Your friend Boniface Dulani has talked about this difference between the demand for democracy and the supply of democracy. Part of what is going on in this decline of democracy is not really that people are demanding less democracy. There might be some of that. But they're dissatisfied with the supply of democracy. And so, part of the solution then is not... "Hey, we need a new system instead of democracy." It's actually to make democracy work better. And I think this is also true for foreign aid.
And this goes back to your earlier question of what we do today. If we want government systems to work well, we want voters to be looking to governments to deliver services. If you talk to anyone in the current UK government, a big concern is: how do we create resilience in these aid-dependent economies? And the answer, of course, is partly democracy. We want people to hold the government accountable. We want governments to have the resources and capacity to deliver the services that voters need.
And that's making democracy work effectively. And so, part of the argument of the book is to say, well, aid and democracy interact in a very fundamental way. And we need to think about how we can make aid work better for democracy.
[Dan Banik]
I often think about these trade-offs. So, you could deliver development, but it could create a problem of legitimacy for the government because voters will know, citizens know, this is being done by a foreign donor. And by the way, many donors, not everyone, but many donors have big signboards saying this was a gift from their government or whatever. So, there's a way of convincing local people that this is not something the government has been doing.
And this is particularly a problem because many donors have cut budget support, which used to be more common. Budget support means supporting the government's budget without necessarily distinguishing that this money is coming from us or that this project is being done with our money. It gives the government more legitimacy to say we are undertaking development. So that's one aspect.
And I know that you discuss some of these theoretical aspects in your book, but looking at the literature on legitimacy, Ryan, looking at the literature on ownership of development, if you don't pay taxes, then you don't really care what is being done. The role of taxation is important. If I pay taxes, then I'll hold the government to account. Why are there potholes in front of my house? What's going on?
If you have donors doing development, then you're taking away that kind of accountability, perhaps, that kind of ownership, that kind of legitimacy. And you could also have situations, as you highlight in the book, where whichever party is in power basically gets to decide, or influence donors: "Do development in my area. Do development so that it benefits my people." So, there's the elite capture aspect.
When you think about all of these theoretical perspectives on aid and elections and democracy, where does your argument fit into all of this? Do you sympathize with some of these challenges with donor activity undermining legitimacy, undermining accountability? How does your argument fit into that overarching sort of literature on the topic?
[Ryan Jablonski]
I think you summarized it well. Particularly in political science, there's been this argument that aid is bad because it undermines taxation, it undermines legitimacy of the state. And I think there is something to that. I think these kinds of parallel governance systems are sometimes a challenge. But I think that doesn't really characterize the way aid works today in a lot of different countries.
The reason is that if you look at most aid delivered in Malawi, Kenya, Zambia or Bangladesh, it's often not simply a technocratic donor delivering a project. It's a process of delegation and bargaining through many different channels. Politicians are involved—national and local politicians—along with NGOs, area development committees, project management units with government representatives, and bureaucrats.
And so, what we end up with is this kind of complex, somewhat extra-legislative process of delivery that involves both government actors and international and local NGO actors. So what I argue in the book is that when we're thinking about accountability, right, and in political science, accountability means the ability of voters to observe and punish a politician who doesn't act in their interest. And what you want for good accountability is you want the visibility.
I want to know: what does a politician do? What does a donor do? Who actually delivered this school or built this water point in my community? My argument is that what a lot of this literature gets wrong is to say that governments aren't involved and people don't look to governments to deliver aid. I don't think that's true. Voters look to governments as stewards of aid. They look to politicians as stewards of aid.
I did some focus groups, for instance, where we asked people, "What makes a good politician?" Very frequently, people said, "I want a politician who can speak English. I want a politician who has good connections with donors." That's what you want in a very aid-dependent community, and it suggests that people are looking to governments, not just donors, to provide development.
[Dan Banik]
Are we talking about wheeler-dealer politicians? You want well-connected, versatile, the gift of the gab kind of politicians?
[Ryan Jablonski]
I don't think it's even that. There's some interesting research in Pakistan, for instance, showing that if you give people profiles of politicians and mention that one had a consulting relationship with the World Bank, that has a huge effect on whether people want that politician. Why? Not because there's something about the World Bank, but rather because you want those connections. Because those connections are then what brings development to your community.
[Dan Banik]
Because it is about bargaining. It is about negotiating a good deal. Or diverting resources from the multilateral system or bilateral donors to your constituency. So, if I were a voter, I would obviously think that this person is very good at getting things done. I may overlook certain other flaws. I may overlook other challenges that this person has been facing. Perhaps they have shifted political parties or been indicted for corruption. Is that how I would be thinking?
Is the bargaining capacity of whoever I am voting for the most important thing?
[Ryan Jablonski]
Well, as you mentioned earlier, if you look at surveys in sub-Saharan Africa, what do people want from the government? They want jobs, they want fresh water, they want hospitals, and they want schools and teachers. And if you want those things in a very, very poor economy, you need donors, you need NGOs, you need the international community. I looked up the statistics in Malawi, for instance, that 2% of Malawi's education budget is available for capital expenditures.
They spend about $1 per person per year on capital expenditures. It's less than 1,000th of what the UK, for instance, spends. And what I find is that it's actually the less well-connected politicians who tend to build bargaining relationships with donors. Because if you're a local councilor and want to repair the roof of your community primary school, there's no money in the local council to do it. You've written about this in some of your work.
You need to involve donors if you're going to actually make this work. And so it's not a story of aid somehow substituting for corruption, where having a great relationship with donors allows you to be more corrupt. No, it's more about voters trying to find politicians that are working hard for their community. This is what good democratic governance is.
You want politicians that are working hard for your community, and if democratic accountability is working well, you want voters that are able to observe that good work and sanction bad work. Aid is part of this process. When that new school gets built, and yes, maybe it's branded with the name of an NGO or the name of a donor, but a politician is part of that process and voters see the politician as part of that process. And that is part of how they see development working within that community.
[Dan Banik]
It's not a simple relationship. The politician wants something from the donor, the donor wants something from the politician, and voters want something from both. And I was thinking, Ryan, about the first time I went to Malawi, around 2005 or 2006. I was fascinated that I was able to access all these politicians, from the ruling party and the opposition parties. Everybody was saying, "We can come to your hotel. It's dark, it's dangerous. We'll come to you." And for the last 20 years or so, I've had that relationship. I'm always amazed. And I keep telling people that's the best country in the world to do research because you have access. In hindsight, part of the reason people wanted to come and speak to me, I imagine, was also the country I was coming from. Norway is a big donor.
And so, by association with the University of Oslo and Norway, perhaps they thought I had some influence with the ambassador or the donors, even though I'd like to believe it was my academic credentials that made them want to talk to me. Reading your book, I really enjoyed thinking through the process of bargaining. So, if you can walk my listeners through that process, let's say you want to build a school, you want to build a health clinic, and as a politician, you have very limited resources and you know that the donor is there or an influential international NGO with fat pockets.
As a politician, you're seeking out those people. And from the donor's perspective—and I've written about this with my colleague Michael Chasukwa—it often makes little sense to talk to politicians or administrators, whom donors often see as inefficient or corrupt. They may want to go it alone. They want to bypass the local machinery. But you also write about the reasons donors have for talking to politicians.
And then finally, if you can then sum it up and say, how do voters think about the donors and politicians talking together?
[Ryan Jablonski]
So, to the first part: what do you do as a politician? I do a lot of interviews and surveys with politicians in Malawi, I think. And as you mentioned, one of the things that's lovely about Malawi is how open political figures are to talking honestly about kind of the struggles they find. And the almost universal complaint, particularly among local politicians, but also among opposition MPs, is the lack of money. There's just no money to do anything.
So, people get elected saying, hey, we're going to fix the school. We're going to build a water point. We're going to repair the roads. And they get elected and find that there's no money. And very often then that leads to accusations of corruption. As you know, local politicians in Malawi have huge turnover rates. I think in one of the elections, over 70% of incumbents were voted out simply because they didn't have any money. They didn't have any resources.
And so, what I show in the book is that what local politicians and MPs as well tend to do is, hey, I have a problem that I need to build a new school. If I have a connection with an NGO that is in this sector, I'll give them a call. I'll have a meeting. In many countries, this is somewhat formalized. In Malawi, you have the area development committees.
You have similar kinds of committees in Kenya and Zambia where you have a kind of formalized infrastructure where you're meeting with NGOs, you're meeting with donors. There's also oftentimes a process, a kind of more formal process of consultation. So, as you know, Dan, right, if you're a donor and you want to go and build a new health clinic in a particular community, what's your first stop? Your first stop is the district office. In Malawi, maybe the district commissioner.
And that district commissioner will often—it varies across districts—say, well, you need to sit down with the area development committee. You need to meet with this councilor. You need to meet with this chief. And there's this kind of formal consultation process. And DCs and ADCs vary in how they regulate this. But at least some DCs will say, hey, well, here's our development plan. This is what we want to do. And you need to go here instead of here.
And yes, I think there are some donors, certainly not all, who would say, hey, we would just as soon not have to work with the politicians. We don't want to have to pay the per diems. We don't trust them. We think they're using everything for nefarious political purposes. But a lot of them aren't that way. And a lot of them are forced to kind of follow this formalized procedure, which means that governments often have quite a substantial input into how these projects play out.
And that is in the interest of many donors as well. You build a clinic, but you can't just build the clinic. You need it to be staffed and resourced, and you need roads leading to it. You need the government to be involved and embedded in the project. So, donors, NGOs, governments, politicians and bureaucrats all have power and influence in this process, and that shapes how the project plays out.
[Dan Banik]
But in the end, it's the one with the money who decides whether to follow a certain procedure and conduct these consultations or not. The donor sits with all the power. And I'm asking you this, Ryan, because over the years in countries like Malawi, the general sort of dissatisfaction I've heard from elites is that the donors control too much. They're too influential. They're subverting our democratic process because they have so much money.
And this brings me to the economist, the Malawian economist that you quote in the book, Thandika Mkandawire, who talks about choiceless democracies, that maybe in the end, it is just the money that decides. So, how do you see that? Have you identified a mechanism where you see donors saying, hey, to hell with this consultation, that there's a threshold—this is fine, but not if the per diems exceed a certain amount? Does that happen?
[Ryan Jablonski]
Yeah, and I think I very much sympathize with my former colleague Thandika's argument, who's writing largely about Malawi back in the early 2000s, saying, hey, we've got donors that are telling parliament what to do. This doesn't make any sense whatsoever from the standpoint of democracy. And this is really undermining democracy. But at the same time, I think... Thandika, unfortunately, isn't here anymore.
But I think I would push back a little bit on Thandika's argument and say that we're not in a world of choiceless democracies. I think Thandika's predictions are a little bit off in the sense that governments, parliaments, politicians and bureaucrats actually have a lot of voice and say in how development happens. It's not the case that donors simply dictate, oh, here's our development plan. Here's what needs to happen. No, they take into account the development plan of local communities.
And yes, this is incomplete. It's problematic in 1,001 ways. But it is still a bargaining process, and there's still power on both sides. Is there a lot more that could be done? Could this be done better? Certainly.
[Dan Banik]
You could have a government, you could have bias creeping in. The ruling party convinces the donor to invest or do certain development projects in areas that don't necessarily require them. You could direct donor money to your own areas. We've seen this in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia and elsewhere. There are lots of these cases. So, it's not like the donors are deciding. It could also be the other way around: the ruling party is pulling donors in a direction they should not be going.
[Ryan Jablonski]
Yeah, you had Ryan Briggs, for instance, on this podcast, and he shows quite nicely that one reason we see more money going to the hometowns of political leaders is that donors often see that as easier. If you have a close relationship with the government and you're going to a place that the government is also prioritizing, then that development happens quicker, it happens more efficiently, and it works better.
[Dan Banik]
Ryan, so we've been talking a lot about Malawi, and I think my listeners are maybe wondering, I keep having these episodes on Malawi. Of course, I love Malawi and it's an interesting case. But there are many other countries that are highly aid dependent, but also democratic. How does this argument resonate in other contexts?
[Ryan Jablonski]
I think the argument resonates particularly in highly aid-dependent areas, whether we're talking about Sierra Leone, rural areas of Kenya or Uganda, we're talking about Zambia, to some extent Mozambique, Bangladesh, places where the government struggles to deliver the kind of public services, particularly new public services, that voters are demanding. You end up with what I call political dependency.
Politicians, in order to be successful, cannot just rely on the typical activities of going to parliament, going to council or raising taxes. They are politically reliant on the activities of donors and NGOs. So, for instance, in the book, I look at how the geography of aid spending is a kind of measure of this. When and where does aid follow the politics of political leaders?
So if we expect politicians to have influence, we would expect more aid to be spent in areas that support the ruling party, for instance. And I show in the book that this is true in Sierra Leone, it's true in Malawi, it's true in Kenya, which suggests that this really is a fairly universal phenomenon. There are some things that are unique in Malawi because of its highly decentralized nature of aid dependence.
But I think the argument travels fairly well to a lot of very aid-dependent economies.
[Dan Banik]
I'm thinking as a voter. Even in Norway, I don't always know. I don't have access to all the information. What kind of deals were negotiated? What were the terms? In fact, this is actually one of those areas where Chinese aid is often criticized. It's all secretive. We don't know anything about the contracts. But a lot of this applies also to Western aid. You could have negotiations at the international level, at the national level.
And then when we are having these politicians, these local councilors that you were talking about negotiating with an NGO, etc., things are being done. It's not always transparent. So from a voter perspective, Ryan, what did you find? What were they saying? How do they put the two and two together and make sense of it all? Is it visible development? Is it roads and buildings that they can touch and see and smell? So how do voters navigate this terrain?
[Ryan Jablonski]
One premise I start with in the book, which I think is well supported, is that voters care a lot about this question. It is not the case that they are making naive decisions about where aid projects are coming from and who is making the decisions, but actually voters care a lot about where the money in their community is coming from and who is responsible for it. But at the same time, there's a lot of uncertainty, as you mentioned.
I ran a survey where I interviewed teachers and I interviewed citizens about the kinds of development in their community and who brought the development. And voters do a decent job of identifying whether it was a particular donor or politician, but they're correct only about 50% of the time. It's far from perfectly accurate compared to what teachers know. And you're right, this is somewhat universal. If we go survey Norwegian voters or UK voters, we find similar kinds of processes.
I think the difference is twofold. One is the level of complexity. So, in Malawi, there are about 2,000 NGOs working across pretty much every village. There are dozens of major donors and all sorts of project management units. The process is incredibly complicated. And I show in the book that even politicians struggle to figure out where donors are operating within their own communities. The level of complexity is one difference. The other is the availability of information.
If you want to know who filled a pothole in the road near your house, you can find out. There will be a Hansard record, a document, a speech or a budget process. If you see a project being built that's branded by an NGO or branded by USAID or FCDO or something in a village in Malawi, and you're trying to figure out, well, was my politician actually involved in that project or not? There's not a clear process to do it.
In fact, I quote a couple of instances in the book where a local bureaucrat told me about a bridge that had been built by a local NGO. Next week, the MP showed up and said, hey, I worked with this NGO to go and build this bridge. Look how great it is. And then the next week, the councilor showed up and said, hey, look at this great bridge that I built. And they all got mad at the councilor and believed the MP instead of the councilor. And that's one instance. But this happens.
There's lots of evidence that this happens a lot of different places.
[Dan Banik]
But how do the politicians actually convince the voters? Is it just by showing up and in a rally saying, look, I delivered this through my contacts? Is that the best way?
[Ryan Jablonski]
That's part of it. I've been involved in some of these kinds of aid delivery projects where an NGO shows up and delivers a project. And frequently the politician will show up at the same time and give a little speech talking about how important this is for the community. They may not explicitly say, hey, I delivered this project. This was me. But that's part of the assumption—that the politician was involved.
[Dan Banik]
So, you want to be seen hanging around with these people.
[Ryan Jablonski]
Yeah, you want to find ways to claim credit. And the problem is, like, it's not clear exactly. It's often unclear exactly how that credit should be allocated. It could be that the politician was only involved in a brief conversation. It could be that the politician was intimately involved in every step of the process. And that uncertainty is really problematic when we think about electoral accountability. We want visibility.
In some sense, we want that politician showing up. We want them taking credit for what they're doing. What we don't want is the bridge story that I told about. We don't want the politician that can lie or mislead voters about what they actually did. What we want is ownership plus transparency.
[Dan Banik]
And Ryan, I've been thinking about another thing while reading your book, and that is aid from the Global North versus aid from the Global South or South-South cooperation, which is becoming a big thing in countries like Malawi. The Middle East is important. You have Japan, you have South Korea, you have Indonesia, you have Brazil, you have the BRICS there, China, India, hugely important.
Now, if I'm a voter, am I even thinking about the distinction between donors interested in governance, democracy, electoral integrity, empowerment and articulating citizens' interests, and donors who don't mention these issues at all? For them, it's about building something and then disappearing. It's not about democratic ideals at all. Are voters thinking about that or are all donors in the same boat?
[Ryan Jablonski]
I think this is a great question. I'm not sure I or anyone yet has a great answer. I think my sense of the work that's been done in this area so far is to say that voters care a lot about the process of development. They want development to not be corrupt. They actually are fairly positive towards conditions that kind of restrain the government and force them to spend money effectively. My colleague Mirko Heinzel, for instance, has done some surveys around this area.
At the politician level, I think the evidence suggests the preferences oftentimes differ a little bit. So, Daniel Nielson and colleagues, for instance, have done some interesting work in Uganda looking at politicians and voters, looking at how they view conditionality. They show that politicians don't want conditionality. They actually want fewer limits on aid, which makes sense. You're a politician, you want more discretion over how the money is spent.
And I think this then maps onto how we think about World Bank funds versus Chinese funds. What has characterized FCDO or USAID funding, even more than World Bank funding, is that much of this money is channeled away from the government. It has a lot of strings attached. It has very specific purposes and targets. Whereas China... I think it's overplayed sometimes the extent to which China doesn't have strings attached.
I think that that's not quite true, but they certainly give governments a lot more discretion over how the money is used. China is much more open to governments approaching them and saying, for example, "We want a new stadium," and trying to find ways to finance that particular stadium. And I think that flexibility is quite attractive to a lot of politicians. Of course, it comes with its own set of costs.
[Dan Banik]
Indeed. What I often hear in these contexts is the phrase "policy space." We have more elbow room. We have flexibility. And by the way, they would also say we get to do projects like infrastructure projects that the Global North doesn't prioritize. It's only China that is building any of this. So, it's not always problematic in the sense that in a country like Malawi, I see that it's almost like it's divided. The Global North, the OECD-DAC donors do health and education and China does infrastructure.
India does more education and maybe health, things like that. It's almost like they've all carved out a niche for themselves. But Ryan, we're getting towards the end of our conversation, and I'm wondering what advice you would give to my listeners, many of whom are from the UN and the aid world.
If we are to stand out and distinguish ourselves as donors from the Global North, interested in democracy promotion, human rights, women's rights and climate change—issues that many others may not be focusing on—what should we do differently? Should we be highlighting certain relationships more? Should we be talking more about certain things that are seen to be taboo? One of the things I noticed, I don't think you mentioned the role of witchcraft and suspicion.
This is something I've just recently written on. There's so much going on. There's a lot of suspicion, lack of transparency. Not all of it is coming from the donor side, by the way. There's a lot also coming from the local context. But just sticking to the donor perspective, what advice do you have for strengthening democracy, for strengthening the election process, making voters more perhaps interested in holding leaders to account for failing to deliver development?
[Ryan Jablonski]
I think I'm going to say something that might upset some of my colleagues, which is to say that...
[Dan Banik]
Even better.
[Ryan Jablonski]
I think we should let aid fail. Not in a global sense, but in a specific sense. I think donors are very often so concerned about corruption in aid—that money is going to be misused. It's going to be spent in the wrong place. It's not going to be as effective as possible. For democracy to work, you want both the successes and the failures. Because failures give voters information about what works and what doesn't.
And if the trade-off—and I think it is a trade-off—is that giving more ownership to government means accepting more corruption, more political bias and perhaps some less effective spending, then I think that's a trade-off worth making. From a development standpoint, there are all these capacity spillovers that result. But more importantly, from the standpoint of strengthening democracy and having a government that is accountable to its citizens, that's exactly what you want.
You want the failures and you want the successes.
[Dan Banik]
They're worried about their taxpayers questioning this failure. And that's why one is obsessed with successes. This is actually one of my most critical points to a lot of our NGOs in our countries. I want them to also talk about the failures and they seldom do. It's always about everything they're doing is win-win.
[Ryan Jablonski]
Yeah, and of course, that's a fair point. The last thing you want as an NGO is to be written up in the Daily Mail in the UK over some corruption scandal. So, I understand both sides of this. But at the same time, the way that we've been doing aid, it doesn't make a lot of sense from the standpoint of development and democracy. Oftentimes, if you look at the way USAID spent health money in Malawi, USAID spent about twice what the government spent on health aid in Malawi.
But a lot of that money was spent on managing procurement, creating parallel procurement systems to prevent corruption. If the goal is to save as many lives as possible, that doesn't make a lot of sense. The government already has a procurement system. It already has warehousing.
And if you accept that you're going to lose 20 to 30 percent of medicines delivered through government systems, then, yes, you get some losses and inefficiency, but you can end up with much more effective development. So, I think the argument I would make, as we consider what aid should look like in the future, is that there should be more real government ownership.
Not in the sense of creating a new committee or management unit, but of taking seriously the government systems that already exist and investing more in them in a way that allows them to succeed and fail, and to work through the democratic process, even though it is going to be messy.
[Dan Banik]
And democracy can be messy.
[Ryan Jablonski]
Democracy is messy.
[Dan Banik]
Ryan, it's been such great fun to see you and to chat with you and not least have the pleasure of reading your book, which I highly recommend to all my listeners. It's open access. And thank you very much, Ryan, for coming on my show today.
[Ryan Jablonski]
It's been a pleasure, Dan.