The issue of foreign aid is once again in the news as the international development select committee has blamed the global spread of Ebola on spending cuts made by the British government. Meanwhile, in South Sudan, relations between foreign aid workers and the country’s government have been called into question, and, in Australia, a recent report has suggested that the government there has been considering foreign aid cuts in order to fund military involvement in Iraq. 

Despite these difficulties, Danish novelist Janne Teller has spoken to the IAI about the need to maintain aid to those countries that need it most. “There is a moral case for aid,” she says, “both due to arguments of humanity as well as due to the guilt of past Western sins of colonialism.”

Teller is the author of the best-selling Nothing (2000) as well as War, what if (2012), about life as a refugee, and Everything (2013), a collection of short stories. Teller was originally educated as a macro-economist and worked for the United Nations on development and conflict resolution in Tanzania, Mozambique and Bangladesh until 1995. She is highly critical of the current approach to aid and recommends a structural overhaul of the way it is administered: “The present system does too little good compared to its costs. That doesn’t mean that aid should be abandoned, but the system should be totally transformed.”