A Question of Interest?

Profit-making instruments and institutions are gaining momentum in the international development industry. How is this possibly influencing moral understandings of aid? This essay explores that question through the moral reasoning of some of the professionals charged with managing private sector aid: guarantee experts, investment managers in development finance institutions, and consultants working in development finance in western Europe and East Africa. At the core of their reasoning resides the link between profit making and self-interest, which they sometimes deem irrelevant, sometimes virtuous, and sometimes outweighed by commercial incentives’ superior ability, compared with aid grants, to foster reciprocity and equality in donor-recipient relations. The latter rationale construes development investments as relational investments, suggesting a reinterpretation of risk-taking and profit making in capitalist logics. Their favoring of commercial assistance models over grants is informed by a conviction that capitalist exchange, just like charity, can foster social relations but in ways that strengthen rather than disempower partners in the Global South. These claims deserve empirical scrutiny. They also inform two areas of anthropological theorization. One concerns economic morality in neoliberal capitalism and the other aid as a Maussian gift and what happens when financial capital, rather than alms, is repurposed as a gift.