Canada must rethink its strategy for aid to Mali

The August 18 coup d’état in Mali was an embarrassing failure for the international community. In Canada, this failure has raised questions about the impact and responsibility of Canadian military and development cooperation. Let us be clear: Canadian cooperation cannot be held responsible for the coup. To make that connection is to greatly overestimate the level and impact of Canadian influence. Since the previous coup of 2012, Canadian official development assistance (ODA excludes military cooperation spending) has ranked Mali as a priority (by spending) between 13th (in 2014) and fourth (in 2018), hovering around fifth. With this two per cent of aid spending Canada is among Mali’s top four bilateral donors, after France, Germany, and the United States. A recent increase in 2019 to $140-million raises Canada’s annual average flows since 2012 to $120-million and raises the 15-year annual average to $108-million. Yet, Canada’s sense of Mali being an important aid recipient clouds our understanding of how important Canada is to Mali. This is not to under-appreciate the service of thousands of Canadians and relationships built with Malians and Malian organizations over decades. These efforts have enabled successes on the ground for individuals and communities from north to south and east to west. However, beyond the many success stories, it is crucial that Canada not deceive itself about the significance of what we do through development and military cooperation. Canada’s annual aid spending is about eight per cent of Mali’s total aid and represents $6 per person per year: the price of five kg of rice in Mali’s markets. It is hard to overemphasize the necessity of clear (and likely discomfiting) thinking about what scale and depth of structural transformation is the appropriate ambition of Canada’s development and military cooperation in Mali, or anywhere. Although donors might fruitfully target the most visible symptoms of state fragility, they do not address structural conditions inherited from legacies of colonialism and the persistent postcolonial cycles of instability and state fragility. Funding and emphasizing quick impact projects will produce relatively immediate and reportable results, but most often at the margins of adaptive national and global structures and transnational networks. Within these structures and networks are Malian and global elites who often prefer only small adjustments to the status quo, or none. Status quo means that Mali’s most vulnerable and marginalized populations live under conditions that are hard to envision transforming in anything short of multiple generations—given the current scale and limitations of development cooperation. And that is without considering the setbacks of armed conflict or coup d’état, or the challenges that climate change and pandemics present to mainstream development thinking. Mali shows the need for strategic, innovative, and long-term thinking about the effects that international cooperation can have on power relations and conflict dynamics. Cooperation that disregards these dynamics can actually worsen marginalization, and thus deepen conflict-prone social divisions (like farmer-herder relations in the central Malian regions, or inter-rank relations in the military). Further, cooperation that is insensitive to climate impacts risks undermining the desired stability and livelihoods necessary to make peace durable and wellbeing sustainable. Indeed, livelihoods that are at significant risk from climate impacts need innovative and responsive development cooperation investments. Such responsive innovations need to be nearer to the centre of donors’ activities, and not only at the under-funded margins of core programming. Malians are calling and struggling for structural changes to their political economy and society. The August coup further underscores and amplifies these calls. When citizens across Mali explain that business-as-usual cooperation benefits an entrenched political class, sustains political crisis, and exacerbates social divisions, to what extent does Canada take seriously and integrate these concerns into cooperation approaches? Mali’s partners need to support emergent visions and accompany these struggles—not because they bring obvious and ready-made solutions to profound and longstanding problems. Rather, if donors like Canada want to walk the talk about doing development differently, then we need to listen, and try, and fail, and learn—differently. Pursuit of status quo incremental adjustments has produced concrete if modest impacts, but as the Malian situation suggests it has also sustained fragile and risk-prone institutions and practices. Malians want and deserve better. Mali’s partners can do better. For Canadian cooperation to do other than accompany crises, Canada has an opportunity in Mali to rethink, retry, and relearn its relations with fragile and conflict affected states, and the people who live in them. Bruno Charbonneau is an associate professor of international studies and the director of the Centre for Security and Crisis Governance at Royal Military College St. Jean. Jonathan Sears is an associate professor of international development studies and an associate dean at Menno Simons College. The Hill Times