NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Why am I disgusted by the Trump administration’s pause on USAID projects and funds? Humanitarian aid has always been part of a neocolonial project, and I have spent decades critiquing the work it does in Africa, especially how it produces a kind of imagined Africa and propagates a set of ideas about what the continent needs (see my book White Saviorism and Popular Culture and the forthcoming documentary When I Say Africa). This humanitarian-industrial complex depends on the infrastructural and extractive inequalities that are created by colonialism and sustained and rebuilt by imperialism and late-stage capitalism.

Photo courtesy of USAID – US Agency for International Development.