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Paper short abstract

This paper critically assesses whether multipolar aid enhances equity in Africa or reproduces dependency under new alliances. It argues that donor diversification expands bargaining space but leaves core power asymmetries intact without strong African-led governance.

Paper long abstract

The reconfiguration of global development cooperation toward a multipolar aid order has been widely celebrated as a corrective to the asymmetries of the traditional donor–recipient model. For African states, the expansion of partnerships with emerging actors from Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America, alongside established Western donors, appears to promise greater policy autonomy, financing options, and strategic leverage. This paper adopts a critical political economy approach to interrogate whether this shift has meaningfully advanced equity in Africa’s development partnerships or simply reshaped existing hierarchies of power.

The analysis moves beyond descriptive accounts of donor diversification to examine the structural conditions governing contemporary aid relations, including bargaining power, conditionalities, debt exposure, and agenda-setting authority. Drawing on comparative cases across infrastructure finance, security assistance, and development programming, the paper demonstrates that while multipolarity has widened Africa’s diplomatic and financial space, it has not fundamentally altered the rules through which aid is negotiated and deployed. In several instances, competitive geopolitical interests have intensified fragmentation, weakened accountability, and displaced long-term development priorities.

Innovatively, the paper reframes equity not as a function of the number of available partners, but as an outcome of African agency exercised through institutional capacity, regional coordination, and strategic selectivity. It argues that without robust African-led governance mechanisms, anchored in continental frameworks such as Agenda 2063, multipolar aid risks reproducing dependency in more complex and opaque forms.