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Dependency is a mutual relationship. Whether it involves alcohol, drugs or foreign aid, the relationship persists because one party adapts their behavior to require the “fixes” to continue and the other party adapts their behavior to ensure they are provided. With few exceptions, countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) are aid junkies, and aid agencies are aid pushers.

What is the evidence? Over the last four decades, there have been hundreds billions of dollars in development assistance supplied and used in a multitude of programs. These have been associated with myriad conditions, a host of development paradigms, and mutual commitments to “aid effectiveness,” “ownership,” and “partnerships” and similar concepts. The outcome: most countries in SSA have little capacity to continue their “development” without additional flows of development assistance. They cannot balance their budgets, service their foreign debts, provide sustained support to their education and health sectors, finance and maintain their infrastructure, and keep their populations food secure. For their part, aid agencies have little to offer to “promote development” except more of the same shifting kaleidoscope of programs and projects that have sustained this pattern of non-development.

Countries and aid agencies alike have an alternative. It is an aid exit strategy. It is a country-driven effort lasting around a decade that would reduce the role of aid from its current agenda-dominating dependence to incidental levels. A benchmark would be significantly less than 2 percent of GDP – high enough to allow critical, nationally-requested support to be provided, but small enough so that it does not dominate the local agenda. Furthermore, to be effective, the aid would have to be “self-help” i.e., donors should only contribute to initiatives that the country itself is providing the bulk of the funding.

At the end of the decade, the goal would be for the country to finance its programs in a sustainable manner (implying a balanced budget over the cycle) and have external debts that can be serviced out of export receipts. Its food and agriculture sector would be expanding and tangible progress would be evident in rural, social and human development. A constructive balance between public and private activity and initiative would be emerging.

What is the evidence that such a program would work? The Marshall Plan had aid exit and self-help built into it. The United States required both South Korea and Taiwan to reduce their dependence on development assistance in a structured way. Mauritius effectively moved itself off aid. Costa Rica did the same.

Formulating and implementing such a strategy would involve major changes in behavior. Governments would have to tax appropriately and spend efficiently; they would have to ensure their exchange rates encourage exports so that the trade account could swing into surplus; and they would have to promote agricultural and rural development so that the country could become food self-reliant. Most important, they would have to use the foreign assistance they receive to supplement rather than supplant local efforts.

What is the likelihood that countries in SSA will formulate and implement an aid exit strategy? Under current circumstances, it is not likely. Foreign aid has built-in inertia. Aid dependence runs deep.

What is the appropriate role for aid agencies? The most important change will be to shift to “self-help.” This is more than the recent fad of “ownership.” “Self-help” implies that the country will put up its own scarce resources (labor, finance, facilities) to initiate and continue an activity. When nations avoid putting their own “skin-in-the-game” donors should not bother.

While the current situation may appear unattractive, at some point, change will come. The low-income countries (especially in Asia) that have been growing and developing on a sustained basis have rationalized their aid relationships. Their leaders and citizens have begun to understand that their countries have no future as nations while their development agendas are determined abroad. For their part, donor agencies are likely to have increasing difficulty justifying their support as “development aid.”

In the early 1990s, Peter Bauer, Eliot Berg and the team that I worked with in Africa, began urging that an aid exit strategy would provide a constructive path to economic and social development. Events since then have reaffirmed the point.

Malcolm McPherson is a Senior Research Associate with Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.  He previously worked for the Harvard Institute for International Development.

Related Material from Atlantic Community:

• Editorial Team: A New Course for Western Aid to Africa
• Lawrence Haddad: Six Ways to Improve Aid Effectiveness