(Re)building Trust in Official Development Assistance

This article focuses on France’s official development assistance (ODA). It raises the question of how to restore trust with recipient countries — or even to establish it in the first place, since one may wonder, in light of a genuine fight against poverty, whether it ever truly existed. The article is structured around three main points. The first highlights what aid is not: it clearly does not serve as an effective means to combat poverty, despite that being its primary mission. The second point explains what characterizes aid. Built on the dual foundation of solidarity and interest, it struggles to strike a balance between these two elements. In reality, the scale tips overwhelmingly toward influence, increasingly at the expense of solidarity. The third point offers avenues for rethinking aid and considers what it should be in order to (re)build trust. The main proposal calls for embracing a genuinely endogenous approach based on job creation and local wealth generation. To this end, it recommends structurally separating loans (associated with influence) from grants (associated with solidarity).