Adventures in the Aid Trade: Forty Years Practicing Development in Forty Countries, by Richard Holloway

Richard Holloway is a veteran who has worked in the international development business for decades and lived in multiple countries. He’s avoided—mostly successfully—working with large aid organizations (he has worked on some projects funded by the World Bank and DFID) instead preferring to work with people on the ground through a variety of civil society organizations. This book distills his experiences and is intended as advice to young persons embarking on a career in the field. The lessons are valuable and the book is interesting even to someone like me who has had his own four decades in the air trade, albeit mostly at the policy level and not the “coalface” like the author (Holloway’s term).

The book also tells stories from his adventures in Africa, Asia, and the islands of the West Indies and the South Pacific. The chapters are organized in a similar fashion, starting with a description of the country and its situationula and what the author did there; followed by a sections on “What did I learn from the coalface?” and “What happened to it all?” This latter probes into whether anything good stayed after he left; i.e., whether the benefits of the projects he worked on were sustained. The chapters often end with “What were we thinking at the time?” explaining the logic behind the interventions and containing some published resources. Several chapters also have a section on “And on a personal note” which tells about the author’s life (and in later chapters that of his wife who made her own career mostly in UNICEF) in the countries through illustrating and sometimes amusing anecdotes. Richard Holloway is not a particularly eloquent writer. His prose is straightforward and does the job.

Some of the chapters stand out to me. South Sudan’s civil war is nowadays often in the news (although not as often as it would deserve to be). Holloway worked there in 1973-75, before the current troubles started, although their roots can be detected already then. He worked extensive periods in Bangladesh (1989-1995) and especially in Indonesia (1979-84 and 1999-2004). This latter also included work in Timor Leste as it became independent from Indonesia after a brutal war. His description of the gradual shift from emergency relief to long-term development with an emphasis on human rights is enlightening with a description of the complex socio-political situation in the new island nation.

To me, perhaps the most interesting section pertains to Myanmar (2015-16) and the travails of working in an ethnically divided country ruled by a violent junta. The latest of the many coups d’état there took place in 2021.

Several important themes arise. One of them is corruption, which is a way of life in many of the countries in the global South. Another is the frequent tension between civil society and the government. Holloway emphasizes the need for aid and development workers to thoroughly understand the places they work in. He urges aspiring development workers to start by being sociologists or anthropologists, understand the history, and to learn the local languages to the extent possible. Development must reflect the needs and aspirations of the people on the ground. It is very important to understand the people’s livelihoods to be able to support their own development efforts.