By In the poorest countries of Africa, USAID has made significant strides in localisation, systems strengthening, and community empowerment, but the real question is whether development in Africa should be primarily externally financed at that scale. The future of African development lies in how we structure and empower it, not in who gives. NGOs and local actors must diversify their funding base, turning to innovative sources like impact investors, blended finance instruments, and diaspora-backed community funds. The answer is transformation, treating Africa as a partner with ideas, talent, and solutions.
“Realigning funding with community-led adaptation strategies and systems thinking is crucial for a regenerative, inclusive, and scalable future,” says Péter Danku-Elsenbroek, an international aid worker, when asked about the problem of reliance on international funding. Péter Danku-Elsenbroek is a Disability Inclusive Rural Development and Sustainable Farming Advisor, who has broad experience in trade financing, donor relations, and diplomacy. He served as a government official in Budapest, then as a consul in The Hague, and briefly as Deputy Head of Mission in Angola. He is a Dutch-Hungarian dual national, the father of five children, and currently lives in Madagascar.
The very first assignment as a humanitarian worker was when you joined the International Leprosy Mission as a project coordinator to help the communities with disabilities in the Central African Region. Can you tell us why you chose them?
In 2019, while serving as a posted diplomat at the Hungarian Embassy in Angola, I suffered a life-altering medical crisis caused by fluoroquinolone toxicity due to mistreatment. It abruptly ended my diplomatic career and left me with disabling motor impairments and chronic neuropathy that I still live with today. Yet that rupture gave me clarity – a sense of mission that transcended titles, ambition, or the world of dignitaries. So, joining the International Leprosy Mission was my response. The “why” behind this redirection haunted me for a long time – until I found the answer two years later in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
During a visit to a leprosy ward, I encountered a young woman, a war survivor and a patient living with leprosy, who had lost both her legs. She was being presented to visitors in a way that lacked dignity, as though she were an object of spectacle. That evening, instead of joining the planned sightseeing program, I returned to the hospital alone to see her again. I brought her some small delicacies as a gesture of quiet consolation. On her face, I saw an unforgettable expression of joy – a moment of rejoicing born from comfort and human connection. It was a mesmerizing moment. It was the first time I truly grasped the words of Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you” – declares the Lord, -“plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope.”
What other projects have you worked on in recent years?
Much of my recent work revolves around building market-based systems for inclusion that serve both small-scale farmers and rural communities with disabilities. I’m currently exploring the conceptual and practical dimensions of Community-Based Inclusive Development (CBID) — an inclusive evolution of CBD — at the intersection of disability studies, participatory development, and equity in the Global South. As a board member of Fairtrade Africa, I have contributed to advancing our mission to ensure that small-scale producers – including those with disabilities – are not left behind in sustainable trade systems. In parallel, I am developing WEnable, a new certification and labelling initiative that embeds disability inclusion into agricultural value chains in a way that is not only principled but also practical and market-visible, with impact that can be traced all the way to the shelf.
The Foundations for Farming is an organization that promotes conservation agriculture. May this initiative provide an answer to the international food crisis?
It’s undoubtedly a strong step forward. Conservation agriculture – with its focus on minimal soil disturbance, permanent soil cover, and crop rotation – is vital for sustainable food systems. But if we truly want a quantum leap, we must go further. Integrating agroforestry principles, particularly for high-value crops like coffee and cocoa, not only enhances biodiversity and climate resilience but also improves quality. Just take shade-grown coffee as an example – the longer ripening period under canopy conditions results in a richer flavour profile and higher market value.
Instead of exporting raw beans, we should roast coffee or process cocoa in Africa. This is what retains value, creates jobs, builds skills, and restores dignity in African communities. Fairtrade has made significant strides here.
The Dynamic Agroforestry (DAF) model being piloted within Fairtrade systems promotes biodiversity-based farming while linking producers more directly to premium markets. But beyond methodology, market access and ownership are key.
Foundations for Farming Source: foundationsforfarming.com
A powerful moment that stuck with me came at a Fairtrade conference in Cape Town last year. The director of the largest Ethiopian coffee cooperative addressed the audience and declared: “We shall not go on selling coffee anymore — I mean to say: raw coffee — because we shall add value at the origin.” That’s the kind of mindset shift Africa needs. It’s already happening. Just look at Fairafric, a German-Ghanaian social enterprise that produces bean-to-bar chocolate entirely in Ghana.
Erratic rainfall and prolonged droughts—especially in the Sahel and Horn of Africa—threaten food security. Conversely, intense floods occur in areas like Eastern Congo and South Sudan. How and by what means could the international community help these nations?
What we’re witnessing across the continent is not just a series of natural disasters. These extreme events are the entrance hall to a broader and accelerating climate crisis. The international community can no longer respond with temporary fixes; we need a fundamental shift in how we think about support.
To truly help the African nations, we must move beyond reactive aid and shift the focus toward local ownership, long-term resilience, and inclusive economic empowerment.
That means rethinking our architecture of response. For decades, development cooperation has been too focused on grants, short-term humanitarian relief, and externally designed programming. The way forward is to localise power and capital and shift decision-making and resources into the hands of those closest to the challenges. This includes building financing ecosystems that are not just donor-led but investment-ready.
Critically, this shift must include people with disabilities. They are often among the most affected by climate disruption, yet still among the most excluded from both adaptation planning and enterprise development. Inclusion must go beyond token representation: it must be designed into value chains, investment criteria, and policy frameworks from the ground up. We’ve seen inspiring examples of community-driven resilience across Africa, but many still lack the capital, investment-readiness tools, and partnerships needed to grow.
The challenge isn’t a lack of will – it’s a lack of architecture that bridges local innovation with global finance.
It is time to dismantle outdated aid models. We must move from grants to growth, from dependency to dignity, and from crisis response to climate-smart, inclusive enterprise development.
“The Future of Africa is not Aid-Dependent.”
Many African nations face a dilemma between investing in immediate economic growth and financing long-term climate resilience. Besides the lack of material resources, what are the most important difficulties African societies face?
The tension between short-term growth and long-term resilience is real, but the more critical challenge, in my observation, is not financial scarcity alone, but structural fragmentation. Too often, policies are designed in silos: agriculture here, climate there, social inclusion somewhere else, all under different ministries, donors, or frameworks. This creates a disjointed implementation and limits the potential of integrated, community-led solutions.
Visiting a leprosy mission Photo: Daniel Lacalle
In many places I’ve worked, from Madagascar to Kenya to Ethiopia, the real difficulty lies in aligning local innovation with institutional systems that remain top-down, slow-moving, and sometimes unaccountable. Another major issue is limited investment in human capital and agency. Talented youth, innovative farmers, and entrepreneurs — especially women and persons with disabilities — are too often excluded from decision-making and finance. It’s not just that capital is missing; it’s that the mechanisms to distribute it equitably, inclusively, and strategically are weak or underdeveloped. Also, we must acknowledge the legacy of externally driven development. Much of Africa’s economic infrastructure has been built around extraction and export, not value retention.
How do you describe Africa’s reliance on international aid?
I would describe it as a legacy structure, one that served a purpose in the post-colonial moment, but which now risks becoming a barrier to transformation if not fundamentally reimagined. The problem isn’t aid per se. The problem is that aid has often replaced strategy, creating a cycle where short-term humanitarian logic overrides long-term structural investment. This kind of reliance, when unchallenged, undermines local agency and weakens the incentives to build sovereign systems — whether in agriculture, energy, education, or enterprise.
That said, I don’t believe we should throw aid out altogether. But we do need to radically rethink the terms of engagement. Aid should not be about transferring resources from the Global North to the Global South. It should be about catalysing endogenous systems of growth and resilience, enabling African actors, including organisations of persons with disabilities, rural cooperatives, and young entrepreneurs, to shape and own their development trajectories. In my work, I often quote a line that captures the dilemma well: “No wind is favourable to the captain who doesn’t know to which harbour he is sailing.” Aid, when misaligned, acts like a strong wind in the wrong direction.
The future of Africa is not aid-dependent. It is value-based, investment-driven, and rooted in trust for its people’s capacity to lead. Our role is to dismantle outdated assumptions, build catalytic partnerships, and ensure that any support serves not survival, but sovereignty.
In her book Dead Aid, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo criticized the international aid system, both from the donor and recipient sides. Can sub-Saharan African nations develop without international aid, or is it an impasse to their potential growth?
Dambisa Moyo raised a critical point, and I agree that both donor and recipient structures need rethinking. But the real question isn’t whether sub-Saharan Africa can develop without aid—it’s whether it can thrive while remaining dependent on it. Long-term growth will not come from external charity, but from internal capacity, local ownership, and investment in inclusive, value-based economies. Aid can play a catalytic role, but it must be designed to make itself obsolete.
USAID’s Role in Sub-Saharan Africa’s Aid Dependency
Under the Biden administration, the U.S. has spent approximately $240 billion in development aid across 181 countries. Only in 2024, $12.7 billion of American foreign assistance went straight to sub-Saharan Africa. Now, these aid programs are almost cancelled. What other sources can the global NGOs and the local recipients rely on? Could the UN/EU funds substitute that huge amount of money?
I don’t believe in outright condemning shifts or reductions in aid—but when it comes to USAID, caution is warranted.
In recent years, USAID has taken important steps toward localisation, systems strengthening, and community empowerment.
It has often led the way in rethinking development, moving away from top-down, prescriptive models and toward trust-based partnerships with local actors. That progress shouldn’t be lost.
That said, the real question isn’t whether UN or EU institutions can substitute the previously provided by U.S. foreign assistance. It’s whether we still believe that development in Africa should be primarily externally financed at that scale. If we do, we’re simply rebranding dependency, not dismantling it.
Rather than looking for substitutes, we need realignment. The future of African development lies not in who gives but in how we structure and empower. NGOs and local actors must increasingly diversify their funding base, turning to innovative sources, such as impact investors, blended finance instruments that reduce risk for private capital, diaspora-backed community funds, cooperative equity models, and partnerships with mission-aligned enterprises that create and retain value locally.
The answer is not substitution. The answer is transformation. We must stop treating Africa as a recipient and start recognising it as a partner, one that has the ideas, talent, and solutions, if only we rewire the system to invest in them.
While U.S. aid has significantly supported crisis mitigation in African countries vulnerable to climate shocks, it has not prioritized environmental sustainability or long-term climate resilience. Do you agree with that?
I wouldn’t categorically agree, as there have been a plethora of U.S.-funded initiatives that have. In fact, aspects of climate resilience were addressed, from early warning systems and conservation agriculture pilots to support for clean energy access and natural resource management. Too often, climate interventions remain project-based, donor-driven, or disconnected from local realities and value systems. They may offer temporary relief or pockets of progress, but they rarely shift the structural foundations that make communities vulnerable in the first place. So again, we’re often talking about the problem—not the solution.
The solution lies in realigning funding with community-led adaptation strategies. We need systems thinking – and we need financing mechanisms that go beyond humanitarian cycles and begin investing in regenerative, inclusive, and scalable futures.
What do you personally think about the climate catastrophe? Can we do something about it with our modest means?
Climate catastrophe is real, but it’s not beyond our reach. Even with modest means, communities across Africa are already adapting through regenerative farming, inclusive enterprise, and local innovation. The key is to support these efforts with the right tools, trust, and investment. Change doesn’t always require scale; it requires direction and determination.
