The era of the aid cheque is ending, and Africa is being forced to confront a question it has dodged for a generation: can the continent finance its own development?
The numbers behind the reckoning are stark. Global Official Development Assistance fell by a record 23 per cent in 2025, dropping to about 174 billion dollars, with the world’s five biggest donors the United States, Germany, Britain, Japan and France all cutting back in the same year for the first time. Washington has taken a machete to USAID, gutting health and education programmes across the continent. Britain is trimming its aid budget to fund defence. The message from the traditional benefactors is unambiguous: the flow is slowing, and it is not coming back.
For a continent of 1.6 billion people heading toward 2.5 billion by 2050, which should concentrate minds. Someone must build the schools, wire the grids, pave the roads and staff the clinics that a population growing this fast demands. If not foreign capitals, then who?
The answer, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa, is uncomfortable but liberating: African governments themselves. As Stephen Karingi, a director at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) who leads its work on how African governments raise money at home, puts it, the first responsibility for financing a country’s development belongs to that country. And the striking part of his argument is that the tools already exist the problem has always been the reluctance to use them.
Domestic resource mobilisation is the technical phrase, but it means something simple: raising money at home. That is far more than taxation. It includes revenue from natural resources, domestic capital markets, pension and savings pools, diaspora remittances, public-private partnerships, and perhaps the largest untapped seam; the billions bled out through illicit financial flows and corporate profit-shifting each year. Every one of these is a pathway that reduces dependence on the goodwill of foreign parliaments.
Tax remains the sturdiest pillar, precisely because it is predictable and shielded from the external shocks that make aid and commodity windfalls so treacherous. It also buys sovereignty: a government funded by its own citizens answers to those citizens, not to donor conditions written in London or Washington. The obstacle is structural roughly four in five African workers earn their living in the informal economy, invisible to the tax net. But technology is narrowing that gap. Egypt has used digitalisation to lift revenue collection; Rwanda’s transparent procurement systems have squeezed out the leakages that once swallowed public money.
Here, though, is the catch that no spreadsheet captures. Africans are willing to pay, but only if they trust where the money goes. In interviews across seven countries for ECA’s Sustainable Africa Series, citizens said the same thing in different accents: tax us, but show us the schools and roads it built. A cake vendor in Cameroon put it plainly, she will keep paying, but if nothing changes, the day will come when she stops. That is the whole bargain in a sentence.
This is where the continent’s financing question collides with its governance question, and they turn out to be the same question. Money mobilised is meaningless if it evaporates into phantom budget lines and inflated contracts. A citizen taxed by a government that steals will not be taxed twice.
So the honest verdict is this: Africa can finance far more of its own development than it currently does. The resources are within reach. What stands between the continent and self-reliance is not a shortage of instruments but a shortage of trust and trust is earned only by governments willing to spend transparently and be held to account.
The aid era is closing. The accountability era must open in its place.
