Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Student Scholarship & Creative Works By Year Student Scholarship & Creative Works 2016 Aiding the Underdevelopment of African Economies Hannah Storey Dickinson College Follow this and additional works at: http://scholar.dickinson.edu/student_work Part of the African Studies Commons, Growth and Development Commons, International Economics Commons, Political Economy Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, and the Regional Economics Commons Recommended Citation Storey, Hannah, "Aiding the Underdevelopment of African Economies" (2016). Student Scholarship & Creative Works By Year. Paper 50. http://scholar.dickinson.edu/student_work/50 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Scholarship & Creative Works at Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student Scholarship & Creative Works By Year by an authorized administrator of Dickinson Scholar. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Review of International Studies 2016 Aiding the Underdevelopment of African Economies Hannah Storey Introduction This paper tested competing arguments that foreign aid can substantially aggravate the patterns of underdevelopment in previous British colonies. I followed the Center for Global Development in taking into account Amartya Sen’s understanding of development: “development consists of more than improvements in the well-being of citizens, even broadly defined: it also conveys something about the capacity of economic, political and social systems to provide the circumstances for that well-being on a sustainable, long-term basis” (Barder 2012). Generally in cases of underdevelopment the economic, political, or social system (or a combination of these three) in place is not sustainable and usually short-lived. This study discusses six countries that were under the British Empire: Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.