Does Global Philanthropy Have a Colonialism Problem?
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combine harvester in a wheat field in south africa. Dewald Kirsten/shutterstock
Amid the pageantry surrounding Queen Elizabeth II’s death, fierce debates have been rekindled about the global legacy of colonialism. The U.N. General Assembly is also convening this week, where key philanthropic figures of the U.S.-led liberal international order have pledged to continue tackling global problems, all while facing down the threat of Putin’s Russia.
These two big stories call to mind one of the most common criticisms of global philanthropy — that giving in the Global South in the mode of Gates, Rockefeller, Bloomberg and others represents a new form of colonialism, one that seeks to bind poorer nations into Western-led markets and Western ways of thinking.
For the most part, simply equating the global philanthropic projects of modern business leaders and foundations with the old colonialism is a stretch. The sheer scale and brutality of what imperial powers perpetrated over the past several centuries is horrifying, and throwing around the term “colonial” to describe, say, the work of the Gates Foundation seems hyperbolic. Still, there were plenty of old-school colonialists who earnestly believed that their causes were philanthropic — recall the notion of the “white man’s burden” or Spanish missionaries keen on saving souls.
Many colonialists in the past also operated with inflated and unrealistic ambitions about what they could “achieve” abroad — ambitions which, even when thwarted, often meant death and misery for colonized peoples. Even as U.S. grantmakers increasingly acknowledge the complex and systemic nature of many problems we face at home, and move toward greater deference to those closest to those problems, there still seems to be a lot of appetite for parachuting into the Global South with big money and big ideas. Whether or not you call that a form of colonialism, it’s a status quo that needs more interrogation.
“One of the greatest things that ever happened”
As far as philanthropies go, it’s hard to underestimate the Gates Foundation’s power and influence in areas like global health, poverty alleviation, gender equality work, and much else besides. Agricultural development is another hallmark of Gates’ global funding, and a cause that’s of pivotal importance as the world faces the twin challenges of climate change and population growth.
In a recent interview, Bill Gates made his position on food and hunger clear: “We’ve underinvested in agricultural innovation. The Green Revolution was one of the greatest things that ever happened. But then we lost track.”
The Gates Foundation has been a longstanding backer of a second “Green Revolution” in food-insecure regions of the world, including in parts of Africa. The first Green Revolution was a philanthropy-aided effort that took place during the 20th century, in which countries like India, China and Brazil upped their food production by adopting industrial agriculture practices developed in the west, including “innovations” like pesticides, synthetic fertilizers and hybrid seeds.
While the first Green Revolution did increase food production substantially, it’s been a mixed bag in terms of its social and environmental effects, as well as its tendency to empower corporate agriculture at the expense of small farmers, and often at the expense of hungry people. As is often pointed out, the world produces more than enough to feed itself. Where hunger exists, it’s less a problem of overall production than one of distribution — that is, an economic and political problem.
The Gates Foundation’s long campaign to seed agribusiness across Africa and elsewhere has attracted criticism on the explicit grounds that it’s neo-colonialist. One of Gates’ prime grantees in that push, the Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA), tellingly even dropped the phrase “Green Revolution” from its name and now goes by the acronym alone.
But beyond the question of whether or not it’s colonial, backing from Gates and others for a Green Revolution has also been of mixed effectiveness, as an evaluation by AGRA itself acknowledged. Here at IP, we’ve also harbored longstanding doubts about whether a Gates-style Green Revolution is the best way to handle hunger in an era of escalating climate change.
Alternatives
There are, of course, different approaches to global philanthropy that are seeking to break away from a paternalistic model centering wealthy captains of industry from the West. On the environmental front, for example, the Climate Justice Resilience Fund “supports women, youth and Indigenous Peoples to create and share their own climate resilience solutions.” And Global Greengrants Fund has for many years taken a participatory grantmaking approach, empowering a network of people on the ground in the countries it serves to steer funding decisions.
When it comes to agriculture, an increasing number of funders, the Schmidt Family Foundation being one notable example, are turning to less top-down alternatives like agroecology. Mirroring domestic efforts to democratize giving and cede power, agroecology funding seeks to empower local actors like small farmers, retain traditional knowledge, and reject monoculture farming in favor of more biodiverse methods of food production.
Agroecology represents a clear rejection of the neo-colonialist mindset and has often been framed in those terms. At the same time, it’s also unclear whether its practices, though laudable, will yield enough food for still-ballooning populations in the Global South. As poorer countries are pummeled by climate change they didn’t cause, does the Global North have a duty to engage in large-scale interventions, seeing as it did cause climate change? Or is that the white man’s burden rearing its head?
Yet another dynamic at play is the continuing tendency of many funders to think about Africa as a single nebulous entity, rather than a vast continent encompassing over 50 countries; an enormous range of geographies, cultures and politics; and a land area roughly three times that of the United States.
Not all funders fall victim to this, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard “Africa” referred to in sweeping terms, even by those whose funding only flows to one or two countries there. That seems like a clear warning sign of neo-colonialist attitudes at play — this idea that what works in one place in Africa works across Africa. We don’t hear people saying what works in Pennsylvania works in Peru — even though it’s all the Americas, after all.
Thankfully, some agriculture funders have restrained their ambitions to focus on particular African countries, such as Howard Buffett in Rwanda. Outside Africa, MacKenzie Scott is another mega-donor whose global funding has largely concentrated on one nation, Brazil, though that’s admittedly a much vaster country.
It’s all about those markets
In the end, the question of philanthropic imperialism today boils down, in large part, to attitudes toward world markets. Bill Gates has made his position clear. “Well, we do have some success stories,” he said in the interview referenced above. “Kenya’s tended to be among the best because it’s market-driven, and the export costs — they have better infrastructure, so they are able to connect to world markets. They have more of a capitalistic view of how you get increased productivity.”
If only we could plug these underperforming countries into U.S. and European-led markets and get them to be more “productive,” this view holds, their problems would fade away. Granted, there is some there there — for example, in the fact that several African countries were rather implausibly importing much of their grain from Ukraine, only to experience shortages when Russia invaded and their supply was cut off.
But as the world grows more multipolar, it’s also implausible to assume that a creaky, U.S.-led international order, and a flailing U.S.-led world economy, can or should be a panacea for the Global South’s ills.
I’m not saying U.S. funders should stop working abroad. And “colonialism” remains a strong word for what funders like Gates are undertaking. But as with the old colonialism, the clock may be ticking on the Gatesian approach to global philanthropic engagement.
