Development cooperation has succeeded in reducing human suffering. It has helped prevent child marriages, reduce hunger and improve opportunities for particularly vulnerable people to participate in society. I would argue that the impact of development cooperation on the world is net-positive, despite all its problems. Nevertheless, the field of development cooperation should make a greater effort to make itself redundant.
As a child, the Nose Day television broadcast and the educational UNICEF Walk videos taught me that children in poor countries need our help. As I grew up, I became increasingly aware that global inequalities have not been created by chance but are rooted in the long history of colonialism. Today, I think that development cooperation is an underperforming attempt to compensate for both historic injustice and exploitation today.
The issue with development cooperation is that it relies on the modernisation theory, according to which all countries can take the same path of economic and social development as the old developed countries. However, the economic development of the Global North has been based on the exploitation of the Global South throughout the existence of the current world system. Today, 10 trillion dollars’ worth of workforce and resources “leak” from the Global South to the Global North every year. Development cooperation can only compensate for one thirty-fifth of this unequal exchange. (Hickel et al., 2022)
Development cooperation is rooted in colonialism. Even today, it is a way of spreading the values, religion and ideology of the Global North to the Global South. Fortunately, many actors in the field have taken concrete steps to decolonise their work. The ownership of projects is increasingly held by the local community, and employees are also hired primarily from the target country. However, the internal decolonisation of work does not eliminate the imbalance of power between the helper and the helped. Furthermore, development cooperation considers “development” an intrinsic value and “Western liberal democracy” its objective, without recognising the possibility of other ways of organisation that could equally, if not better, promote the ideal of equality, for example.
The cuts in development cooperation that Venla Lehtinen wrote about in her blog post “Student movement for global solidarity” (SYL blog, 20 August 2025) pose a serious threat to the people in the countries receiving help. For example, the amazing results achieved in Eswatini and Lesotho in terms of the diagnosis and medical treatment of HIV are in danger of being wasted as a result of the shutdown of USAID (Cohen, 2025). When development cooperation gives even a semblance of a fix to an unfair system, the problem cannot be solved by cutting its funding.
The field of development cooperation should therefore demand a global system-level change more clearly and forcefully. The first step could be debt justice, i.e., cancelling debt accrued by the over-indebted countries in the Global South. In a decolonised international system, development cooperation would hopefully eventually become redundant.
Veera Saarenheimo
KENKKU
Sources:
Cohen, J. (2025) Left behind. Science, Vol 389, Issue 6755. doi: 10.1126/science.z86u3ua.
Hickel, J., Dorninger, C., Wieland, H., & Suwandi, I. (2022). Imperialist
appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through
unequal exchange, 1990–2015. Global Environmental Change, 73, 102467. https:
//doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467
