When we talk about helping people — those struck by a disaster, for example, or caught in the vicious cycles of poverty — we tend to talk about it as unidirectional. Those who have give to those who have not. Whether it’s called aid, charity or donations, the idea is that rich people give money to poor people without ever changing those essential categories.
The sudden, illegal, drastic dismantling of USAID — and other recent aid cuts from countries including France, the Netherlands and the U.K. — is a clear demonstration of some of the problems with that model. Depending on governments, it turns out, is risky — particularly when they feel able to break existing commitments with impunity. Governments are rarely disinterested altruists; they approve aid based on their political priorities, whether those are seemingly as benign as the idea that improving standards of living around the world is good for everyone, or if they are more determined by national security and economic goals. USAID intermittently required compliance with the Global Gag Rule, regardless of how it affected public health outcomes, while United States’ international food aid prioritized economic support to U.S. agriculture as much as helping those in need.
Many of us who work in the nonprofit sector are aware of some of the subtler harms of the way giving is framed: the white savior complex so often embodied by donors; the related tech savior complex embodied by rich individuals who want to dictate every detail of programs despite knowing little about the sector, location or history. The way NGO staff from rich countries are, all too often, paid more than those from poor countries; the way the international aid sector has been talking for decades about localization and still largely fails to grapple with fundamental inequalities. Aid is ugly, despite the fact that most individuals working in the sector care deeply and think urgently about what they’re trying to do, and keep doing it because it seems to be the only way to make any difference at all.
Is the current approach really the only way? That, like so many other illusions of our age, is false. There are many other models of how people can help each other, and the confusion and sense of betrayal following the destruction of U.S. international aid institutions makes this a crucial time to start building toward a new system.
Think of mutual aid, for example — through which groups come together to provide support to each other, share resources and collaborate. This happens at the micro-level everywhere — recall the ways people came together during COVID to help their neighbors, support their communities and pool resources to help those most affected. Cooperatives — for instance, around agriculture or finance — can scale dramatically and be far more citizen-centric than larger government programs. A good example of this are Stokvels, South African mutual savings funds that started as a small, collective effort to reduce poverty among disadvantaged women, and which has now grown to more than 800,000 Stokvel groups with 11 million members and $2.5 billion in assets — backed by a national association that ensures coordination, research and access to cutting-edge financial and technology tools.
At the city level, there are abundant examples of mutual aid successes. After the 2001 Gujarat earthquake in India, Mumbai stepped in and provided significant financial aid, technical support and logistical help — both at the city level and through community groups, which lasted for many years. Mumbai’s private sector community — through companies like Tata Group — provided both financial and material support. Likewise, after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the city of Havana in Cuba mobilized to send medical teams, technical support, food and supplies, bolstered by efforts through Cuban civil-society-organized aid drives. Medellin in Colombia has also shared experience with other cities around creative transportation solutions for many years, and worked with urban authorities to implement sustainable urban regeneration strategies. The Latin American and Caribbean Citizen Network (REDLAC) has scaled this kind of learning across municipalities in the region successfully.
Or take the U.S. system of domestic disaster relief, which one of us studied for her doctoral dissertation. The most obvious and well-known conceptualization is that the immensely wealthy federal government, represented by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), descends into disaster zones and fixes everything, like a bureaucratic deus ex machina. Sometimes, indeed, that assistance works well, and for major infrastructure reconstruction, that kind of money can be invaluable. Malka talked to many principled, thoughtful FEMA officials during her research, people who were careful to consult with local emergency managers, and let them lead.
But there was another finding that emerged from Malka’s many interviews on the response to Hurricane Katrina. The Emergency Mutual Aid Compacts [EMACs] system of agreements across states and municipalities around the United States was extremely effective. Whereas FEMA help often came with mountains of paperwork, restrictions on what could be funded and conflicts between the local representatives and decision makers farther away, local officials who arrived through mutual aid efforts knew what their counterparts were going through and could help them where they were. Many of Malka’s interviewees along the coast of Mississippi remembered the positive impact teams from Florida had, and how they explained to the interviewees exactly how to meet federal requirements. Florida had gone through a tough hurricane season the year before; the Floridians knew what to do, and crucially, they knew that this action was reciprocal. The next year, it could be Mississippi sending help to them.
There are other benefits to providers of mutual aid. In Japan, which has a similar system, interviewees told Malka that sending assistance after a disaster, like the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, built response experience for the sending municipality so that their staff were better prepared if an emergency hit them. The cooperation also built relationships that could lead to nonemergency sharing and learning between the two places.
Reciprocity in mutual aid might seem like a stretch when we look at the wealth inequality across countries. But money is not a perfect shield against disasters (not to mention economic shocks). Hurricane Katrina, as well as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, are two cases in which rich, technologically advanced countries struggled to manage disasters. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, other countries offered aid to the United States, which struggled to manage those offers, not because it didn’t need the help — often specific, in-kind assistance, like search and rescue teams — but because there were no procedures in place to accept it.
There are many ways mutual aid has already shown real promise — inclduing time banks, through which people trade their time to complete tasks; community land trusts, which manage land for the benefit of communities and can effectively address issues of sustainability and displacement; and translocal networks, through which local support efforts can build shared identity, narratives and impact. A good example of this would be the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (MST), through which farmers have come together collectively to pool energy and resources to protect almost 19 million acres of land for citizens and to push authorities to build over 2,000 schools.
None of this is to suggest that mutual aid can replace U.S. government largesse, especially not immediately — American foreign assistance was around $60 billion before the recent cuts. But those funds — still less than 1% of the federal budget — also bought control and dependence, not to mention an awful lot of stickers proclaiming that the assistance was from the American people.
We can imagine a world in which each polity — nations, regions, municipalities — sets aside a percentage of their resources for foreign assistance, creating a global fund and pool of expertise for aid where and when it is needed, without the one-sidedness of depending on a superpower, and founded on the understanding that we are all vulnerable to crises or disasters and we all need help at some point. This vision may seem utopian, given how many polities can’t or won’t even set aside enough even for their own emergency needs, but it is both more realistic and more sustainable than a system depending on the extravagant wealth and benevolence of a few rich countries.
Even with more limited resources, mutual aid can achieve something top-down U.S. government aid never found a meaningful way to do — create honest, reciprocal power relationships; reinforce locally driven support networks; and bolster trust among citizens and between communities and governments. It will require a change of paradigm, and a change in how we think about helping others, but mutual aid should be a critical part of international development assistance going forward.
Blair Glencorse is Co-CEO of Accountability Lab. Malka Older is Executive Director of Global Voices.
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