ABSTRACT
To say that Africa’s experiences have been turbulent on the economic front since the mid-1970s would be to state the obvious. The region’s experiences with aid and debt also do not belie that description. Though Africa remains the highest aid-receiving region, the flow of aid to the continent has been neither consistent nor singular in purpose. The evolution of aid receipts has involved a sharp rise during the period of the first oil crisis (1973–1975), a peak in the 1980s, continuous decline during the 1990s, and a recovery since 2000. The primary intent of aid giving also appears to have shifted over time: from the exigencies of Cold War politics to the financing requirements for the Millennium Development Goals and the war on terror. Through all this, though aid has not been irrelevant to economic outcomes, it has not been central (Museru et al., 2014; Nwaogu and Ryan, 2015).
