Compass Money: Dr. Olivia Rutazibwa and Dr. Naazneen Barma Discuss Race and International Development

Dr. Olivia Rutazibwa discusses the relationship between race and international development. (Screenshot from YouTube)

Georgetown University’s Mortara Center hosted Dr. Olivia U. Rutazibwa of the University of Portsmouth and Dr. Naazneen Barma of the University of Denver as part of a series of talks for the Global Political Economy Project - Race (GPEP-R) on March 11. Focusing on the relationship between race and international development, the pair discussed the ways international development perpetuates racial inequality and alternative approaches toward international development.

Rutazibwa expressed that she views the idea of foreign aid itself as “obscene.” Citing her article published in Foreign Policy, she asserted that because international development erases the contributions of previously colonized individuals and replaces it with Western ideologies to promote growth, the concept of aid is  “obscene—and racist.”

Barma agreed and noted that international development frequently “reproduce[s] colonial practices,” using economist Jeffrey Sachs’s “Millenium Villages Project” as an example. The project injected nearly $600 million of foreign aid into ten locations in multiple sub-Saharan countries to test whether poverty would decrease after increasing access to necessities and services like drinking water, education, and better fertilizers. 

Problematically, Barma explained the project dismantled the Indigenous way of life in its development plan, replacing it with Western-style capitalism. Projects were designed to incentivize urbanization as opposed to the indigenous nomadic pastoral way of life in certain locations. As a result, Barma concluded that the development project ultimately “eras[ed] the Indigenous way of life… by privileging Western capitalist technocracy and development as a sort of modernization model.” 

So how should we go about aid and development without reproducing colonial practices? Rutazibwa proposed that the field of international development needs to determine where it should retreat. “From a Western positionality we have to really resist the desire to keep on formulating policies for others,” explained Rutazibwa, “not because the local elites are better, it’s just not our place.” 

But could retreating leave the developing world worse off? As global citizens with an ethical responsibility to help others, “how do [we] ensure that harm [of retreat] is not worse than the harm that has been imposed by white supremacists and capitalist models of development?” asked Barma. She described that Indigenous elites are often just manifestations of colonial hierarchies, so whether outcomes would be better with no foreign involvement is an open question. 

“It's not about not engaging in the process [of development], it's about not engaging in the process first,” answered Rutazibwa. Retreat does not mean taking less responsibility or caring less about an issue; instead, it means acknowledging the underlying reasons why some groups receive disproportionate harm in the first place.

For example, she pointed out how during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, people in West Africa who contracted the virus died at a much higher rate when compared to Americans and Spaniards who also contracted the virus. To Rutazibwa, even though the international response of “sending a handful of doctors and then some shipments of medicine” should still occur to save lives, it does not provide a solution for the structural inequalities that resulted in the disproportionate death rates in the first place. 

Instead, Rutazibwa believes a more effective approach would be to reform the patent law system in the EU pharmaceutical industry, which disproportionately harms low-income countries. Because most drug patents include a 20-year delay on generic competition, patent holders can raise prices as high as they want during that period, making it incredibly difficult for Ebola-affected states to afford life-saving drugs. 

“We don't die of the diseases themselves, but [we die from] the institutional framework,” remarked Rutazibwa. 

She concluded with the message that while it is still important to thoroughly study development, we should “make sure that we study it not to reinforce the systems or tweak them, but to bear witness in detail where it's actually going wrong.”