Decolonising aid is a big term to claim, especially by a western international non-governmental organisation (INGO) in an African country, as happened recently at a Kigali meeting.

But there is a running thread between its genesis and the prize-winning insights of this year’s Nobel laureates for economics. It has to do with the institutions the colonists founded.

The laureates show the link between a country’s development trajectory and those institutions, whether they were inclusive or extractive — extractive in that way they exploited natural and other resources while giving little back.

The laureates find that Europeans who lost their lives, say, to tropical diseases in the territories they colonised tended to exploit its resources including native labour.

One harrowing example is the rubber plantations of the Belgian Congo, marked by its cruelty harking off hands of those who did not fulfil their quotas.

Recall that Rwanda shared the same Belgian coloniser beginning 1916 to the country’s independence in 1962.

The laureates show how democratic and inclusive institutions created by the British colonialists in countries such as Canada, New Zealand and Australia enabled the Europeans who settled there to share in the wealth they produced through private property and free markets.

A corollary of this would be English-speaking African countries where the British, unlike their Belgian peers, found more comfortable climes in the white highlands in places like Kenya and creating more accommodating institutions for the benefit of the kaburu (white settlers).

It reminds me of a discussion years ago with a Francophonie colleague in Musanze in northern Rwanda explaining "the British factor” why Kenya seemed so "advanced” compared to some of the former French and Belgian colonies.

Even so, when the colonialists left, the African countries, as the expression goes, only secured flag independence without economic autonomy.

The newly independent states were often left with institutions that were hobbled by lack of finance, capital, and human resource capacity to adequately apply them in building the new nations.

It did not help that many of the continent’s leaders, including of countries that may have inherited the "better” colonial institutions, banded them with the coups that quickly followed independence, and the perpetual conflicts and corruption that ensued.

Observing how inept had become the évolué — the French term for the European educated elites they hoped would run the countries and look after their interests, the former colonial masters and Western donors stepped in with development aid.

The Ghanaian statesman and pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah had foreseen its manifestation as neocolonialism as early as 1955, and notably in his 1963 preamble of the Organization of African States (OAU) Charter.

Note also his 1965 book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism which lays out his theory of the imminent post-colonial overreach.

As currently defined, the term refers to "the use of economic, political, cultural, or other pressures to control or influence other countries, especially former dependencies (colonies).”

Though Nkrumah may not have articulated quite in such terms, development aid denotes power and is in the perception of many an important enabling factor of neocolonialism, something that donor paternalism does not usually acknowledge.

This is why mention of decolonising aid at the meeting last month of the Network of International Non-Governmental Organisations in Rwanda (NINGO) may have sparked some interest.

The 85-member umbrella organisation was launching its five-year (2024-2029) strategic plan that seeks to entrench localisation of development by ensure local NGOs and community-based organisations have more say in decision-making, funding and leadership of their development projects.

To decolonisation of aid, therefore, is to own up to the paternalism international aid has often been accused of, and a recalibration of an ongoing approach of which the NINGO five-year strategy is among the latest globally.

The attempt at recalibration began in the 1980s with the groundbreaking book "Rural Development: Putting the Last First” by Robert Chambers.

He is renown in development circles for pointing out the failures of the traditional top-down development models, which started a localisation movement to "put the last first” in a participatory approach to rural development.

The localisation does not appear to have succeeded, however. By 2005, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness was noting weak institutional capacities, unpredictable aid flows, and corruption with calls to improve aid effectiveness.

There has since followed a string of such declarations, beginning with the 2008 Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) leading to, among others, the Grand Bargain of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit and the 2022 Effective Development Cooperation Summit.

This succession of global commitments speaks of the importance given to the localising agenda. But it is also about the challenges slowing the process of adapting external aid to local contexts.

We shall explore some of the surprising reasons in the next column.