Aid and Local Justice in Africa

Rahim Kanani at the Justice and Human Rights Domain at Harvard's Hauser Center for Non-Profit Organizations has recently published an insightful interview with Amaka Megwalu on the intersection of the international aid industry with the delivery of justice in Africa. Megwalu, at grad student at Harvard Law, is the first author of "Dilemmas of Justice and Reconciliation: Rwandans and the Gacaca Courts", which is forthcoming in the African Journal of International and Comparative Law, and is a veteran of international aid and post-conflict resolution in Africa.

Megwala highlights the importance of locally driven approaches in effecting meaningful change, whether for justice delivery or aid, in general. My experiences conducting research with Ghanaian NGOs and civil servants certainly backs up this assertion. Here are a couple of my favorite quotes:

While there are no easy answers, we may perhaps learn from our observations. In my experience, the development industry is more successful where there are fewer expatriate staff members and development agencies are smaller and focused on one or two programs. It is more successful where national staff members are given more management responsibility for development programs and expatriate staff members serve in more support/advisory roles.
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I definitely think that local systems of justice should be institutionalized within the broader system of international justice. Often, international justice mechanisms are better than local initiatives at recognizing faults on both sides of a conflict. However, local initiatives are much better at encouraging public participation and fostering reconciliation.

From my conversations with Ghanaian farmers over the past few weeks, it seems like there is a bit of resentment towards aid agencies that put naive foreigners in local-management positions and leave out national staff--a situation that often breeds broken promises and makes future work for researchers (i.e. me) all the more difficult. In particular, these farmers have become skeptical of forming cooperatives because so many foreign aid agencies have tried to deploy this approach but then back out of their commitments. However, it is the actors (whether NGOs, universities or the government) who understand the grassroots needs, usually with the assistance of local staff, that are able to implement the lasting programs and cooperatives and get farmers to appreciate them.

Institutionalizing local justice within national and international law processes is another approach I certainly agree with. Ghana's national law system, particularly with respect to land, is quite complex, given its combination of traditional and common-law systems. When it comes to land disputes, people have the option of going to the police or the official law courts in each district, but most attempt to settle at the village level, whether through a council of elders or another traditional body. Such solutions are effective: they swiftly bring social pressures to bear on the offender and compliance is typically higher. For the international-law perspective, I direct you to my colleague Shelby's blog; she has been writing prolifically on the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the apathy that many Liberians are feeling towards Charles Taylor's trial, which is being conducted at The Hague.