South Africa occupies an interesting position in the international development debate. On the
one hand, as Africa’s most developed, diversified and, until recently, largest economy
representing close to one-third of sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP), it is
an active player in numerous global governance and development fora, it maintains an
extensive development partnership with the rest of Africa and is a member of the group of
emerging countries, the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) Forum. Yet, on the
other hand, it positions itself within the developing world, insisting that South Africa is itself a
developing state despite its wealth relative to the rest of the continent and other developing
countries. Indeed, South Africa’s middle-income status, ranking as the twenty-seventh
largest economy in the world and with per capita income of US$7,508, masks ongoing
significant inequality and poverty in its society. In part, it is the outcome of the legacy of
apartheid despite 20 years of freedom, but also the result of massive and endemic
unemployment, extremely weak health indicators (which have only begun improving recently)
and persistently poor technical skills and educational results. With reference to the latter, this
has been the case despite consistently high levels of expenditure on education over many
years. South Africa has spent on average around 5 per cent of its GDP on education over the
past 20 and preceding seven years, reaching an all-time high of 6.07 per cent of GDP in
1993 (World Bank 2014). While South Africa has enjoyed the longest continuous economic
upswing since 1999 (eNews Channel Africa 2013), with a brief interruption following the 2008
financial crisis, its annual growth rate has been insufficient to create the number of jobs
required to seriously address its high unemployment rate of 25 per cent.It is against this background that South Africa has been both a recipient and a ‘giver’ of aid.According to the National Treasury (2012), South Africa receives around ZAR8bn (US$1bn) a year of mainly European and United States (US) development assistance aimed primarily at the health and education sectors. This places South Africa among the top quintile of
recipients of donor aid in Africa. While South Africa could not be described as donor dependent, given that official development assistance (ODA) represents less than 1 per cent of its annual budget, this aid has been important in helping the South African government to find innovative ways to deal with some of the key socioeconomic challenges that the country faces. Indeed, most government departments use ODA as seed funding to pilot government initiatives, experiment and innovate, but also to leverage domestic resources and improve service delivery. It is also worth recognising that South African civil society organisations
(CSOs) are highly dependent on overseas project grants as an important contribution to their
operating income.
An important corollary to this narrative is that South Africa has also emerged as a key
strategic partner for several Northern, but also Southern, partners. This is largely informed by
its mineral wealth, but more importantly by the strategic position and role that it plays in the
rest of Africa. This is apparent in its various political and economic engagements in the
region and the pivotal role that it has historically played since 1994 as an economic hub and
a gateway to the rest of Africa. While this position is increasingly being challenged by other
emerging gateways to the rest of Africa such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Senegal, South
Africa’s sophisticated banking system and well-developed and diversified economy and
infrastructure provide it with a historic comparative advantage relative to its peers.
A study conducted by the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in 2008 found
that over half of South African government departments are involved in providing
development assistance in one form or another to the region (Braude, Thandrayan and
Sidiropoulos 2008). By 2004, it was estimated that a total of US$1.6bn of South African
donor assistance had been provided to the rest of the region since the mid-1990s (Chin and
Quadir 2012). But even these figures are under dispute, given that this process has been
largely demand-driven and evolved incrementally without a central coordinating mechanism
in place; hence, the current discourse and process underway in South Africa to establish a
South African Development Partnership Agency (SADPA) to act as a central coordinating
body through which South Africa’s various aid interventions would be channelled.
During the course of this research, it became very clear that South Africa cannot be regarded
as a ‘donor country’ or a ‘provider of development assistance’ in the mold of the definition of
donors used by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development-Development
Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC). The OECD-DAC criteria of development aid sit
uneasily with both the actual activities that South Africa undertakes in the region, and
conceptually do not square with South Africa’s world view. Rather, South Africa’s
development interventions in the region are framed within the broad interpretation of South-South
cooperation as articulated in the United Nations Buenos Aires Plan of Action (BAPA)
of 1978 and the High-level UN Conference on South-South Cooperation in Nairobi in 2009.
As noted by Simplicio et al. (2013: 23) and by Besharati (2013a), South-South cooperation
‘operates on the foundational principles of solidarity, non-interference and mutual benefit
which comprise the sharing of knowledge and experiences, training, technology transfer,
financial and monetary cooperation and in-kind contributions, among the developing nations’.
This approach suggests an exchange of resources, technical expertise, peer learning and
cooperation based on a common definition of partnership. It is thus no surprise that the
South African government is wary of describing itself as a donor country and even the name
of its ‘donor agency’ reflects this unease, having changed from the initially conceptualised
South African International Development Agency (SAIDA) to SADPA, which emphasises
partnership (Besharati 2013b).
As will be noted below, a great number of South Africa’s ‘development interventions’ in its
region fall under the broad rubric of peace-building, conflict mediation, post-conflict
reconstruction and stabilisation of the region in partnership with mainly African actors and
often under a UN and/or African Union (AU) mandate. These types of interventions are not
regarded as aid contributions under the traditional DAC framework. Nonetheless, it is a
prominent feature of South Africa’s support to the stability and development of Africa.
South Africa is among the biggest African contributors to multilateral peacekeeping
operations through the AU and the UN. It has been involved in peacekeeping operations in
countries as diverse as Burundi, Central African Republic, Comores, Côte d’Ivoire,
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia and South Sudan. Importantly, apart from
providing peacekeepers on the ground, South Africa has invested heavily in regional
mediation and institution-building efforts in Africa. Of the former, its engagement in DRC has
been the most extensive and ongoing. It has chosen continental initiatives and institutions
focused on the development and stabilisation of Africa as the key vehicles through which it
has pursued its ‘development partnership agenda’ and the re-emergence or ‘renaissance’ of
Africa.