The Oberlin Review
<< Front page News December 14, 2007

Alumna Addresses Agency & Aid

Oberlin students are known for their interest in social justice and humanitarian issues, and Nzinga Broussard, OC ’02, is no exception to this tradition. Accordingly, Broussard delivered a presentation on food aid in Ethiopia to Oberlin faculty and students on Wednesday, Dec. 12.

Broussard’s lecture focused on her dissertation topic, “Aid and Agency in Africa: Explaining Food Disbursements Across Ethiopian Households,” which explores the local power dynamics that affect how food aid is shared. Broussard argued that Ethiopia is an excellent case for studying food aid because “they need it and they receive it…. The Ethiopian government is committed to distributing food aid.”

According to Broussard, most food aid in Ethiopia includes a work requirement.  She said that the research focused on free food aid, which is better for understanding local politics since influential individuals were unlikely to be attracted to the work programs, making it so that work-related aid appealed mainly to people who were genuinely poor. 

However, Broussard also emphasized the importance of the free aid programs. “The poorest of the poor are not eligible for the work programs; they are weak, they are old, they really need free aid,” she said.

The Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission assists Ethopian citizens affected by shocks to the food supply. The commission sets the guidelines for aid distribution and targets it at regions in need, but local peasant associations administer the actual distribution, creating the possibility for the misallocation of food aid. Differing notions of fairness and the potential susceptibility of the local associations lead to corruption, according to Broussard.

In her paper, Broussard reports, “We find that households with characteristics commonly associated with poverty and food insecurity are more likely to receive aid than other households, but that within this group of recipients, political connections and involvement in village-level organizations  are important determinants of aid allocations.” Broussard and her fellow researchers reached this conclusion by expanding on existing research. 

Previous studies of aid disbursement found that there was no systematic relationship between food aid and pre-aid income.  Broussard and her team, in contrast, found that “level of need” was used to select who received aid, but the actual amount allocated to households was not determined by income. Rather, recipients who described themselves to researchers as powerful members of the community receive more aid than their less influential peers.

Though aid might not be distributed according to the intentions of initial donors, households in need are not necessarily completely neglected. “They are being denied [food aid] by the representatives that are supposed to provide, but that doesn’t mean they’re not receiving anything,” said Broussard. “There is a lot of community sharing going on.”

Finding out precisely why aid was not disbursed according to the established guidelines requires “more of [a] qualitative anthropological study,” she said.

Broussard is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Michigan. While at Oberlin she majored in economics and mathematics and led the women’s basketball team in scoring, racking up 1,693 points over her career. Broussard’s presentation was part of the Oberlin economics department’s Danforth–Lewis Speakers Series, which has brought seven economists to campus this semester, including Ed McKelvey, OC ’68, a vice president and senior economist at Goldman Sachs.  Previous speakers have discussed a variety of topics including the economics of creativity, the U.S. healthcare system and corporate governance.


 
 
   

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