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These chants echoed through the streets during the protests following the coups in the Sahel region in 2023. The rapid succession of coups in former French African colonies led to speculations on whether it signalled the end of the ‘Françafrique’ era. While much of the focus has been on the declining military influence of France, the events underscored broader issues relating to colonial legacies and enduring inequalities across the continent.

Colonial legacies are not confined to military matters; they also permeate the economic and political landscape, particularly through channels of foreign aid. Foreign aid has often served as a continuation of colonial dynamics across Africa, reinforcing dependency and perpetuating power imbalances and inequality. Against this backdrop, I pose two questions: “Are colonial legacies in aid to Africa increasing or declining over time?” and “Do these legacies evolve differently depending on the identity of the former colonizer”?

By analysing aid funding flows between 1971 and 2021 from OECD donors to Africa, I find an interesting trend: colonial legacies in aid, if measured through the concept of donor concentration, declines over time across countries. I also show that the rate of decline in concentration varies depending on the identity of the former colonizer. Notably, aid assistance within former French colonies appears more concentrated relative to former British colonies. This change in concentration does not imply that aid itself is somehow less colonial. However, it does show that the former-colonizer-turned-donors, across the board, no longer maintain complete monopoly as aid donors within their former colonies.

 

Background

The question of colonial legacies in aid stretches back to the era of decolonization. Following Second World War, it became evident that colonial empires were coming to an end. Consequently, the former colonizers’ relationship with their colonies drastically evolved, as did their centralized institutions guiding overseas engagement and aid assistance. In the case of France, which was one of the biggest colonial empires in Africa, the Ministère des colonies (Ministry of Colonies) gave way to interim institutions such as the Ministère pour les départements non métropolitains (Ministry for Departments outside Metropolitan France). What is today the modern-day Ministère des affaires étrangères (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Ministère de l’outre-mer (Overseas Ministry), and Ministère de la coopération (Ministry of Cooperation) were established around 1960. Notably, the Ministry of Cooperation inherited many elements from the Ministry of Colonies, including its building, from which it continued to operate out of until 2009 (Pacquement 2010). However, the evolution of French assistance to Africa was not a linear process and was actively shaped by the political developments within France. In the aftermath of ‘Free France’ in 1941, the Caisse centrale de la france libre (CCFL; Central Fund of Independent France) was set up to manage revenues and currency circulation in Africa and other regions. In 1944, CCFL transitioned to the Caisse centrale de la france d’outre-mer (CCFOM; Central Finance Corporation for Overseas France) and its mandate was also extended to the domain of development. Eventually, CCFOM morphed into the Caisse française de développement (CFD; French Development Fund) in 1992 and was renamed Agence française de développement (AFD; French Development Agency) in 1998 (Pacquement 2010). Today, AFD is seen as the country’s main public institution that contributes to the implementation of ‘France’s policy in the areas of development and international solidarity’ (AFD 2024).

Britain, the other major empire, also had a complex evolution of aid institutions following decolonization. The Colonial Office that existed until 1966 merged with the Foreign Office in 1968 to create the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). As this happened, the pre-existing Department of Technical Cooperation started to fade away (Pacquement 2010). Additionally, in 1964, the Overseas Development Ministry (ODM) was set up by the Labour Party in the immediate aftermath of its election win (Dimier and Stockwell 2023). The ODM aimed to ‘rationalize and optimize’ British aid, and in doing so, distinguished itself from its preceding colonial institutions. While the Foreign Office continued to stress the links between Britain’s overseas political interest and aid, the ODM masked these considerations with more objective-sounding technical framings of modernization theories (Krozewski 2015). In 1997, the Department for International Development (or DFID) was created as a fully independent government ministry responsible for international development policy and implementation. Subsequently, in a move marking a clear primacy of geopolitical interests, DFID was merged with FCO in 2020 to create the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Dissanayake and Calleja 2024).

While the overarching trajectories of French and British development assistance may seem comparable in that former colonial institutions eventually evolved into modern-day aid agencies, some distinctions persist. Notably, the Françafrique policy set France on a different trajectory relative to Britain’s emphasis on strengthening ‘British influence’ through bilateral and multilateral fora, as the findings demonstrate.

 

Theorizing Donor Concentration

The role of colonial history in guiding foreign aid has long been established in the academic literature. Alesina and Dollar (2000) found that political factors such as colonial history and UN voting patterns, rather than the recipient country’s political institutions or economic policies, explain how donors choose to distribute aid. Similarly, Andrzejczak and Kliber (2015) found that French development assistance followed the same pattern and is largely driven by colonial history and oil/gas reserves in aid recipient countries. However, these studies have a common pitfall: they study colonial history within a laundry list of potential factors that influence foreign aid, and rarely as a phenomenon by itself.

One way to examine the persistence of colonial legacies is by looking at the notion of ‘donor concentration’, which is what I use in this paper. Donor concentration refers to the distribution of foreign aid sources within a given aid recipient country. When aid is predominantly provided by one or a few donors, it indicates high donor concentration. Conversely, when many donors contribute aid, it reflects low donor concentration. I theorize that high donor concentration signals a stronger persistence of colonial legacies, as the former colonizer—often the largest donor by aid volume—continues to exert significant influence in aid funding. Similarly, lower concentration suggests a waning influence. However, this influence is primarily financial, and the concept does not capture other crucial forms of influence and control, such as setting aid priorities, shaping national agendas, or interfering in military or political affairs. Therefore, any claims around changes in donor concentration should be interpreted with caution.

A limited number of scholars in the past have used the concept of donor concentration to investigate dynamics of foreign aid. White (2002) analyses concentration, from the perspective of the donor, between 1911 and 1996 and found that aid is more diffused than ever. However, the restrictive timeframe and lack of comparison in levels of concentration between donors makes it hard to ascertain any meaningful variation. Other studies have also used this concept, but either conceptualized it differently or used it to answer different research questions. Steinwand (2015) uses donor concentration, as quantified through the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI), to measure ‘lead donorship’ and extent of donor fragmentation. Steinwand (2015) finds that lead donorship is in long-term decline and that uncoordinated/competitive behaviors among donors are on the rise. Similarly, using HHI, Oh and Kim (2015) find that donors tend to proliferate aid as their budget increases, and this leads to recipient fragmentation.

While the concept of donor concentration has been explored in the literature, its application to the study of colonial legacies remains relatively scarce. Although it may not be a perfect measure, donor concentration provides a valuable perspective by enabling empirical analysis of colonial legacies, a dimension largely missing from existing debates.

 

Methods

I measure donor concentration through the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (or HHI), a commonly used measure of market concentration. It is calculated by squaring the market share of each donor and then summing the resulting numbers. The index approaches zero when a market is occupied by many donors of relatively equal size and a maximum of 10,000 when the market is controlled by a single large donor.

The OECD DAC Credit Reporting System (CRS) serves as the data source. The CRS provides official, standard, and comparable statistics of ODA aid flows at the project/activity level since 1973. Additionally, the Colonial Dataset (or COLDAT) which maps the most recent/last European colonizer for every country and the US military assistance database are used. The resulting panel dataset consists of 1,847 observations, with each row indicating a recipient country–year combination. Given the panel structure, the following fixed effects regression (with country and year effects) for the time period 1971-2021 is estimated:

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where;

Yit: HHI for country i at time t

Former_colonizerit: Categorical variable that indicates the former colonizer for an aid recipient country i at time t

Years_since_independenceit: Calculates the number of years that the aid recipient country i has been independent at time t

 it: Represents the total volume of aid (in dollar value) received by country i at time t

US_military_assistanceit: Represents the dollar value of military assistance provided by the United States to country i at time t

𝛼t: The year-specific fixed effects capturing time-specific unobserved factors

𝛼i: The country-specific fixed effects

𝜀it: The error term

 

RESULTS

I begin by presenting some distributions of the HHI. Figure 1 shows a declining concentration in almost every aid recipient country over time, especially since the 1990s. The trend is clearer starting 1990 owing to enhanced data quality from donor reporting systems.

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Figure 1: HHI distributions with HHI disaggregated by aid recipient country, former colonizer and time

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Additionally, the pace of decline appears to vary depending on the identity of the former colonizer (see Figure 2). Once again, the trends are clearer from 1990 owing to better data quality. Running country-specific trends further validate this trend.

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Figure 2: HHI disaggregated by former colonizer and time

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A simple regression (Annex - Table 1, Model 1) confirms the declining donor concentration. On average, the HHI decreases by 208 points for each additional year. The declining HHI is primarily linked to more donors and implementers getting involved in development programs within countries that were once the aid strongholds of former colonial powers. As Fengler and Kharas (2010: 22) note“in the past, a developing country government could convene the top ten donors and cover more than 90 percent of the aid flows. Today (published in 2010), the top ten donors typically cover less than 60 percent of total aid, and this proportion is likely to decline further as new aid players expand their activities.”

Models 2 and 3 check for varying concentration levels across former colonizers. Notably, French colonies appear more concentrated relative to former British colonies. While the regression analysis cannot point to mechanisms driving this, presumably it is influenced by donor-specific engagement strategies. Studies have previously found that Anglophone and Francophone Africa show significant differences in economic growth (Ricart-Huguet 2022), with the Anglophone countries potentially growing faster due to an erosion of the persistence of colonial investments (Kohnert 2022). This points to France playing a more influential role in its former colonies, as substantiated by its Françafrique strategy (Listre 2022).

Models 4 and 5 test whether one observes varying rates of de-concentration across donors. Results show that this is indeed the case with donor concentration in former French colonies falling by 73 units for every subsequent year following independence compared with former British colonies. For non-European/regional colonizers, the concentration increases by 95 units relative to former British colonies. These interaction effects are not statistically significant for former Belgian and Portuguese colonies, however. Combining this finding with those from the previous models, the following insights emerge: (i) donor concentration has generally reduced over time, (ii) former French colonies are generally more concentrated relative to former British colonies, and (iii) for every subsequent year following independence in former French colonies, donor concentration falls. But how can insights (ii) and (iii) be simultaneously true? This is where historical path-dependencies come into play. Britain’s colonial method of ‘indirect rule’ that used existing political structures to project its power (Becker, 2020; Gerring et al. 2011) versus France’s direct rule driven by centralization and close ties between the metropolitan and colonial governments (Lee and Schultz 2011) meant that the extent of embeddedness of each former colonial power within their colony greatly varied. This legacy of direct rule coupled with France’s explicit aim to maintain strong control over former colonies through the Françafrique strategy can help explain the outcomes, atleast partially.

 

Conclusion

This paper set out to answer two overarching questions relating to colonial legacies in foreign aid to Africa. (i) Are the colonial legacies increasing or declining over time? (ii) Does this increase/decline vary depending on the identity of the former colonizer? I find support for the general decline in donor concentration over time and across countries. However, variations across donors exist with increased concentration in former French colonies relative to former British colonies. Notably, the declining concentration does not imply that the overall influence of former colonizers has reduced in African countries. However, what I find is that the tendency to maintain a complete ‘monopoly’ over foreign aid by the former colonizer is reducing.

The main limitation of this research is that it does not account for Chinese aid owing to data availability issues. Additionally, the analysis was restricted to Western, Eastern and Southern African countries, which makes it harder to extrapolate to Northern Africa.

Despite these limitations, the findings contribute to scholarship and policy debates on neocolonialism, dependency, and foreign aid. Given that modern-day inequality is often a continuation of historical structures and path-dependencies, this research maps how historical patterns of aid evolved and will continue to influence development across Africa.

 

References

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