Eritrea is a tiny country in the horn of Africa, not more than a 45,400 square mile sliver of land between big Sudan, Ethiopia and facing bigger Saudi Arabia across the Red Sea.
But what this small country of barely 5 million has done in relation to its bigger continental neighbours, both near and far, is astounding in the history of modern post-colonial Africa: it has refused foreign aid. The first African country to do so.
For a continent that is entirely in the developing economic bracket, which relies in large part on foreign aid from the developed world to shore up its capital budgets, and even more from private donors, it comes as a surprise that little Eritrea is bucking a practice, often necessary but largely wasted by recipients in a lot of cases, that other low HDI (Human Development Index) countries, in and out of Africa, have embraced.
The last time on record it received aid in the form of Official Development Assistance (an aid facility of donor OECD countries) was in 2013, where it took in little more than $83 million. Afterwards, the official policy of the 25-year-old country has been more or less: No Thanks – seeking instead to become self-reliant and rejecting not just development assistance but the crippling dependency it generates in receptor countries.
Eritrea is still tucked away in a troubled corner of Africa, between ethnic and regional hotspots, but one thing’s for certain: in a continent awash with aid and loan dollars eager countries lap up without much thought for consequence, this country has decided to slug it out the old-fashioned way – rising or falling on its own weight – a lesson the rest of Africa – notoriously a continental sinkhole when it comes to aid spend and actual development – can learn from a responsible and determined state.