Dependency and Power in Catholic Charities in Africa: Towards a Trinitarian Ethic for Decolonizing Faith-Based Aid

Introduction

The central claim of this essay is that Catholic international development must move from asymmetrical charity toward a Trinitarian framework of partnership. Such a framework is asset-based, mutually accountable, synodal, and structurally accountable to the poor, who should be the main stakeholders in every faith-based charity. I offer a model of solidarity grounded in participation and reciprocity. Drawing on postcolonial theory (Ilan Kapoor), liberation theology (Gustavo Gutiérrez), Catholic social teaching, especially the priority of participation and integral human development, mission history (Jonathan Bonk), and analysis of power (Augustine), I contend that the ethical renewal of Catholic aid requires a reconfiguration of power itself. Reform, therefore, cannot be limited simply to improved accountability, transparency, or efficiency. What is required is a conversion of relational power. The essay develops this argument through a critical ethical analysis of four typologies of faith-based charity in Africa.

The question is not whether Western Catholic charities should assist churches and communities in Africa. Christian solidarity has always involved material sharing across ecclesial boundaries (Acts 5:1–11). The deeper question concerns how such assistance is structured, narrated, and institutionalized. When aid is embedded within racialized hierarchies, unilateral planning, and modernization assumptions that treat African churches as immature recipients rather than co-agents of mission, it contradicts the relational anthropology affirmed by Catholic social teaching. In such cases, practices of charity risk reproducing the very asymmetries of power they seek to overcome.

To expose this ethical tension, I begin with a genealogy of Catholic aid and its dependency architecture, then turn to postcolonial and liberationist critiques of development. I then identify four predominant models of aid operative in Catholic practice and propose, as a constructive alternative, a Trinitarian ethic of partnership rooted in perichoretic and relational co-responsibility, and in mutual gift-exchange, particularly developed in part IV of the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality.

Historicizing Catholic Aid: Missionary Modernity and the Architecture of Dependency

I would want to capture the central argument of this first part with an important historical fact. The first African Catholic educated in Germany in modern history was Mbange Akwa, who was brought to Germany in 1888 by German missionaries working in Cameroon and trained at the Benedictine school near Munich to be a support staff to German missionaries. His education was supported by aid from the German Catholic Center Party (Zentrum). His arrival was celebrated with great joy at the German Catholic Congress (Katholikentag) that year. The leader of Zentrum at that time, Ludwig Windthorst was clearly moved by the presence of Mbange and spoke in these words that had a very racial undertone to it: “We can clearly see that Black Africans are capable of developing, and because they are our fellow men, because like all of us, they have God-given souls, we must do everything we can to make them see the light of the Gospel.” ¹ Windthorst and Zentrum were quite convinced that converting young African people and educating them was the path to supporting Africa. They also embraced the mission of supporting priests abroad as a national and patriotic act, particularly to evangelize and civilize what were considered pagan and underdeveloped peoples of Africa. Three years later, Mbange returned to Cameroon and began work as a local catechist and translator for the German missionaries, serving as a cultural and linguistic bridge in the early years of that mission.

It is sobering to note that more than 150 years after the first African was sent to study in Germany with financial support from German Catholics, the structural pattern of dependence has not fundamentally shifted. Missio Germany, administered through the Internationales Katholisches Missionswerk (Missio) in Aachen and Munich and supported by the German Catholic Bishops’ Conference (DBK), together with Misereor, remains among the principal contributors to the training of pastoral agents and to the financial sustenance of many local churches in Africa. The Dicastery for Evangelization in Rome, formerly Propaganda Fide, also plays an important role in supporting the formation of pastoral agents and the financial sustenance of many local churches across the continent. It is obvious that Catholic charities have evolved from mission-centered charities carried out by missionaries in Africa, for instance, to Catholic charities run by dioceses, religious congregations, and Catholic international foundations interested in development and humanitarian work in Africa. Catholic international charities have also evolved in their language, adopting more professional frameworks for fundraising, communications, and accountability protocols, as well as grant-making processes and cycles. However, the architecture of a top-down dependency model has remained the same. A greater portion of the finances for running dioceses, religious congregations, Catholic professional groups and associations, Catholic schools, hospitals, and development in Africa continue to be maintained through external funding.

This enduring dependency cycle raises an unavoidable and uncomfortable question: Why have the Catholic churches in Africa remained structurally dependent on Western ecclesial institutions for so long—indeed, from the nineteenth century to the present? Is this merely a legacy of missionary generosity? Or does it reveal a deeper pattern of ecclesial power, economic asymmetry, and theological imagination that has yet to be fully interrogated? To pose these questions in a different way, one is forced to raise the concern that Jean-Marc Ela posed within the wider context of leadership in Africa: Why was it so easy for colonialism to take hold in Africa? To this question, I would add, why is it so easy for African churches and modern-day African religious and political leaders to submit themselves so supinely to Western powers and become beholden to Western donors? What are the worldviews and pathologies of power in Africa that make dependency possible? ²

This concern over dependency should be placed in a historical context and within a postcolonial critical hermeneutics because more than fifty years ago, African churches unilaterally declared an end to foreign aid and mission money in Africa. Between 1971 and 1974, there was a strong movement for a self-governing, self-reliant, and self-reproducing African Church. This movement led to the 1974 All African Conference of Churches (AACC) Lusaka declaration for a moratorium on missionaries and money being sent to Africa. This declaration, supported by some Catholic clerics, reads in part: “to enable the African church to achieve the power of becoming a true instrument of liberating and reconciling the African people, as well as finding solutions to economic and social dependency, our option as a matter of policy has to be a moratorium on external assistance in money and personnel. We recommend this option as the only potent means of becoming truly and authentically ourselves while remaining a respected and responsible part of the Universal Church.” ³ The Catholic Church is not a member of the AACC, but the document submitted by the African Catholic bishops to the 1974 synod on co-responsibility spoke in part of the need for Africa to assume full responsibility for her mission, theology, pastoral life, and social ministry. ⁴

It must be stated that dependency and subordination are important matters, and they have additional baggage in Catholic history and decision-making. Perhaps it is worth mentioning at this preliminary stage that charity and solidarity among churches have always been central to Christianity. The Acts of the Apostles gives us a particular example of the dire consequences suffered by those Christians who failed to share their resources with their brothers and sisters in need (Acts 5: 1–11). Thus, there is always a critical judgment to be made in evaluating the reluctance of those actors with resources who use the desire to avoid cultivating ‘dependency’ as an excuse to deprive people of the resources they need by refusing to be charitable. Thus, we must admit that ‘dependency’ rhetoric means something very different when it is used by the rich and powerful of this world than when it is used by subordinated and poor groups. ⁵

This essay does not dismiss Catholic international charities in toto; something I have defended elsewhere. ⁶ Albino Barrera, for instance, shows how Catholic mission charities have been lifesavers in many parts of the world in “various development fields of health, education, and social services” in the face of the triadic failures of government, markets, and civil society. ⁷ Scholars such as Bertrand Taithe, who focus on missionary medical missions in Africa, particularly Ad Lucem in Cameroon, have argued that the shift from mission charity to faith-based organizations within the Catholic Church reflects complex issues surrounding anti-modernism in Catholic mission work. His analysis highlights the tension between a distinctive faith-based approach, driven by the desire to be present amid suffering, and a secular approach shaped by colonial consciousness. This tension helps explain some of the historical issues behind the transformation of Catholic charitable institutions into NGOs in terms of operational structures particularly with fundraising methods introduced by then Msgr Lavigerie after the great famine in Algeria in 1869, while at the same time maintaining Catholic ethical principles, professional standards, and accountability. ⁸

The concern of this essay, however, is on the unhealthy aspects of continuing to maintain a dependent relationship between many African mainline churches and their Western partners, donors, and patrons. Our focus shall be on the Catholic Church. As Jonathan Bonk demonstrates in Missions and Money, scholars of African Christianity need to pay more attention to the ways in which the current relationship of dependency between African Christianity and the West has developed because of the affluence of Western missionaries and their paternalism in Africa, and the strategies, systems, and institutions that they built. ⁹ Bonk quotes the words of Gandhi addressed to American missionaries in 1936, “if you dangle your millions before us, you will make beggars of us and demoralize us.” Sadly, Bonk contends, Gandhi's statement has become a fulfillment of prophecy when one looks at how the Western-linked churches in Africa operate today and how dependent African Catholic churches have become on foreign donations. ¹⁰ This can best be demonstrated by examining the Catholic Church in Africa through a historical lens.

Catholicism in Africa was built within a structure of dependency. Missionaries relied on financial resources from Europe to establish and expand the Church across the continent. Parishes, seminaries, schools, clinics, printing presses, and catechetical centers were largely funded by donations from European Catholics, missionary societies, and charitable associations. The infrastructure of the Church—its buildings, personnel formation, and even stipends for clergy and catechists—was underwritten by benefactors abroad. This cycle of giving was sustained in Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, beginning from the nineteenth century to the present day, through mission societies associated with the Society for the Propagation of the Faith and the Holy Childhood Association, among others, who were responding to the call to support the missions in the non-Western world, especially Africa. These well-meaning initiatives by Europeans who wanted to help Africa came at a price: the framing of Africa as helpless, pagan, populated by people who were dying, with gaunt-looking and emaciated children. Africa was portrayed as a land of misery, and Europeans were encouraged to open their purses so that pagan villages could now be turned into flourishing Christian communities of civilized peoples. ¹¹

Pope Pius XII, in his encyclical Fidei Donum: On the Present Condition of the Catholic Missions, especially in Africa (1957), was very significant in defining the direction of Catholic mission and humanitarian work in the post-World War II era. However, it also reflects the dependent, racist, and paternalistic charities that developed in the African mission in the second half of the twentieth century in the Catholic Church, and which continue to date. He writes as follows in Fidei Donum: “There is every reason, therefore, why we should be subject to no small anxiety with regard to the fortunes of Catholicism in Africa. There is every reason why all the Church's children should clearly realize their serious obligation to give more effective assistance to the missionaries. This they must do at the opportune moment in order that the message of saving truth may be brought to what is called ‘darkest’ Africa, where some 85,000,000 people still sit in the darkness of idolatry.” ¹² Historian Elizabeth Forster notes that the document has the tone of “condescension and paternalism toward Africans.” ¹³ Even though today, with the emergence of world Christianity as the Christian mission crosses different cultural and spiritual frontiers, Africa is becoming a dominant demographic powerhouse in the World Church, and the shift has moved from mission to development, Africa still appears primarily as a recipient, while Europe and North America appear as benefactors. The deeper question, therefore, remains epistemic and theological: who is imagined as the giver and who as the receiver? Who narrates the story of the Church in Africa, and from whose vantage point? We are challenged, in this light, to raise a recurring concern about why Africa has continued to be presented as a church and people in need, and why local churches must annually petition foreign donors to sustain ordinary operations. Dependency and ecclesial infantilization have been normalized in Africa through these mendicant cycles of mission following money. ¹⁴ Grant-writing thus becomes ritualized as pastoral agency and pastoral care, while accountability flows upward to donors rather than outward to local communities. Such patterns risk fostering the internal subordination that long has been condemned in liberation theology. ¹⁵

Dependency and the Architecture of Power in Catholic International Charities

The ecclesial dependency between the North and South must be read within the wider asymmetry of unjust global relations in which helping people experiencing poverty in Africa, for instance, functions to sustain a system of aid and transactions that ineluctably sustains the structures of injustice in the world in which people experiencing poverty are ‘used.’ In Dilexi te (no. 5), Pope Leo XIV proclaims that “contact with those who are lowly and powerless is a fundamental way of encountering the Lord of history”, affirming that the poor are not merely objects of aid but loci of Christ's presence and revelation to the Church (Dilexi Te, 5). The structure of Christian aid from the West to Africa has always been problematic and “sometimes has been made the tool of imperialism.” ¹⁶ However, this situation has become more complex today as the prevailing structures of global development appear to be exhausted and fracturing. This has left people experiencing poverty even more vulnerable to global economic warfare, forever wars, protectionism, tariffs, and suspension of aid and solidarity without any replacement. This is why it is important to locate this discourse within the global aid regime and logic or illogic of international development.

Since President Harry Truman's 1949 inaugural address, which announced a “bold new program” to improve “underdeveloped areas,” development has often been framed as a transfer of knowledge and capital from advanced societies to less developed ones. William Easterly documents how such paradigms, despite benevolent intentions, have repeatedly failed to produce sustainable transformation because they operate within a teleological assumption of convergence toward Western modernity. ¹⁷ The language of “underdevelopment” itself presupposes that history moves toward a normative endpoint already achieved by the West and that the Western development paradigm could be implemented through technocratic solutions in the non-Western world with utter disregard for the rights and agency of people with low incomes. ¹⁸ While Populorum Progressio (1967) rejected the development paradigm of Bretton Woods and the World Bank, and the language of solidarity and integral development entered the Catholic vocabulary, Catholic charities, however, continued to operate within the structures of a convergence theory of modernity and neo-liberal capitalism.

In my view, this dependency constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to the emergence of a truly contextual African Christianity capable of strengthening human agency through the instrumentality of faith. Christian expansion in Africa, if it does not take the task of decolonizing ecclesial structures seriously, will remain structurally compromised. If it fails to interrogate and dismantle the current aid regime that has reduced many African Catholic Churches to perpetual beggars for grants, subventions, and Mass stipends for their pastoral agents, it will continue to reproduce asymmetrical relationships of power. And if it does not foster a renewed African theological imagination capable of guiding ecclesial and social practices toward authentic human and cosmic flourishing, then growth in numbers will not translate into maturity in mission. Without these structural and theological conversions, Christian expansion risks, through the law of unintended consequences, prolonging rather than alleviating the precarity of African societies.

For the most part, Africa's social conditions have become the conditions for the emergence of heroes, saviors, and martyrs, while providing “a rhetorical ground on which a new sense of heroic history could be acted out” in figures whose lives are projected as demonstrations of hope and resilience. ¹⁹ Yet the broken institutions and weak ecclesial structures, both local and global, that produce these painful social conditions remain intact—the spectacle of heroic suffering substitutes for structural reform. In the words of Janet Poppendieck in her study of food aid in the U.S, there is a correlation between ‘kindness’ like giving food aid, and justice. According to Poppendieck:

The resurgence of charity is at once a symptom and a cause of our society's failure to face up to and deal with the erosion of equality. It is a symptom in that it stems, in part at least, from an abandonment of our hopes for the elimination of poverty; it signifies a retreat from the goals as well as the means that characterized the Great society. It is symptomatic of a pervasive despair about actually solving problems that has turned us toward ways of managing them: damage control, rather than prevention. More significantly, and more controversially, the proliferation of charity contributes to our society's failure to grapple in meaningful ways with poverty. ²⁰

Poppendieck introduces a postcolonial critique of charity and international development, which Ilan Kapoor in The Postcolonial Politics of Development makes explicit, where he argues that critics of dependency theories often criticize the asymmetrical power relationships between the Global South and the Global North without paying attention to the bigger global economic and political system, particularly neo-liberal capitalism and its architecture of violence. Dependency is not simply about trade deficit or imbalance but rather of a global structure of domination driven by a political and economic system in which the poor are objectified. Kapoor proposes transcending the critique of dependency and focusing on postcolonial discourses that contest the “universalization of the capitalist mode.” Neo-liberal capitalism and its projects of modernity, globalization, or global order, spun by the West, essentialize a particular narrative of history and convergence that has existed since the Western Enlightenment and the birth of the modern capitalist system in the West and the world order it invented. ²¹ Postcolonial critique with dependency theories begins by highlighting the destructive effects of development projects on the poor. However, it goes beyond the rejection of the unhealthy and paternalistic exchange in local and global economies and development by dependency theories to question the systems and structures that make people dependent and make some masters and others servants. For Kapoor, then, the focus on unequal exchange between nations or on making more aid available to the poor without interrogating the global economic and political system, particularly neo-liberal capitalism and its architecture of violence, is a band-aid solution that mistakes the symptoms for the disease.

Kapoor's critique becomes sharper regarding what he calls celebrity humanitarianism. Here, poverty in Africa, for instance, is staged as spectacle and Africa becomes a dumping ground for Western ‘rescue fantasies.’ ²² The poor in Africa are no longer subjects of relationships but rather objects of compassion, with images of disaster circulated just as Lavigerie did in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, in some of the lantern images posted on the doors of churches in Europe: different times, but the same narrative of suffering in Africa. African poor people line up in scorching heat to welcome and dance for the celebrity as saviors, while the structure of power remains the same. Celebrity humanitarians aestheticize and sensationalize the suffering of people in Africa through their occasional generosity; human suffering is commodified and circulated as compassion currency in high places in the West, using the same capitalist logic that produces and sustains poverty and human suffering. It masks and hardens the vertical relationship in which fundraising, expertise, decision-making, and accountability regarding the poor flow downward, leaving the poor as pawns on this economic chessboard, where the winner takes it all. Kapoor's insight here is significant for many reasons. First, traditional dependency theory rightly exposed unhealthy paternalism in the exchange between the poor and the rich in local and international development and questioned the altruism of charity and benevolence from the rich to the poor, but it assumes that this structure can only be changed if better terms and conditions are designed for such exchanges to improve this vertical relationship. But Kapoor calls for a more systemic reform of the global economy, politics, militarism, and international relations that produce injustice and misery worldwide. Second, he calls for the dismantling of systems that reward the rich for keeping the poor in their place through celebrity humanitarianism and charitable outreach that promote the celebrity's global visibility through demeaning images that fetishize the poor.

This insight radically reframes the ethical problem. Rather than merely criticizing paternalistic exchanges between donors and recipients, postcolonial critique asks why some nations are persistently positioned as donors and others as recipients. Why do trade regimes privilege industrialized economies? Why do intellectual property laws restrict vaccine production in low-income countries? Why are African nations disproportionately vulnerable to climate disasters despite contributing least to global carbon emissions? Why do industrialized nations manufacture and distribute diseases in Africa through commercial determinants such as processed foods, air pollution, and sugar-sweetened products, only to then export humanitarian aid to Africa? Postcolonial critique will condemn the false charity that promoted what operated in Gaza during the war. In that unfortunate war, the U.S. made missiles and fighter jets that rained down bombs and deaths on the poor and vulnerable non-combatants, especially women and children, while, at the same time, the U.S was distributing aid through an American foundation as if to say that “war is okay as long as it serves to create conditions for distributing humanitarian aid.” ²³ Postcolonial theories thus reject all forms of assistance and aid that “end up incorporating the non-Western world into a Eurocentric and teleological historiography, ignoring or flattening difference, and denying agency.” ²⁴

This critique is central to liberation theology. Like Kapoor, liberation theology develops a theological-ethical critique of the structures of sins, structural violence, and globalization that continue to hold God's people in perpetual bondage, poverty, and avoidable suffering. Liberation theologians reject the existence and sustenance of the global order that produces a world in which some are permanently cast as donors and benefactors. In contrast, others are structurally confined to the role of beggars. As Paul Farmer, Gustavo Gutiérrez, and Paulo Freire, among many others, have consistently argued, what is required is not merely charity and aid but a social justice approach to integral human development that leads to both pragmatic solidarity and social transformation, and to the emergence of a new heaven and a new earth. There is a need to move beyond prevailing charity and development models by confronting the structural causes of social misery and injustice. True generosity, as Freire reminds us, does not consist in occasional acts of kindness that leave systems intact; it begins by struggling “to destroy the causes which nourish false charity.” ²⁵

In this light, what is required is a dialectical analysis of poverty—an analysis attentive to the structural interdependence of wealth and deprivation. In many societies and across the globe, “the growth of poverty is dependent on the growth of wealth.” ²⁶ Poverty and wealth are not accidental neighbors; they are often mutually reinforcing outcomes of the same economic arrangements. It is an inverse law: those who require a ladder for social mobility sink ever deeper into precarity. In contrast, those already ascending the ladder of privilege rise higher still, occasionally glancing downward at the poor who pursue them for succor and charity. As one formulation within liberation theology puts it: “Liberal views place the problem with the poor themselves: these people are backward and reject the technological fruits of modernity. With assistance from others, they too will, over time, reach a higher level of development. Thus does the victim-blaming…recur in discussion of underdevelopment.” ²⁷

Catholic social teaching emphasizes the agency of the individual and the dismantling of unjust structures. The personalist anthropological foundation of Catholic social teaching rejects the objectification of the poor and charitable models and interventions that fail to address the root causes of social misery in local and global settings. The relational aspect of Christian personalism is worth highlighting here because ultimately the common good is the sum total of the daily choices persons, communities—local and global—are making in the way they conceive their relationship with each other. ²⁸ Solidarity and charity are aspects of the common life that must be designed in societies with a view to increasing the participation of all in the common good from the perspective of assets, gifts, presence, and recognition rather than needs. In other words, everyone participates in the common life through the gift of who they are, in great or equal measures. Each person's participation is always through acts of reciprocity. But attention must be paid to the power dynamics in every society and to how they work for or against individual participation and sharing in the common good, because, as David Hollenbach writes, Catholic social teaching emphasizes that “the participation of the marginalized takes priority over the preservation of an order that excludes them.” ²⁹ An examination of the four paradigms of Catholic charities that I have developed will show concretely how dependency has shaped practice and what is wrong with three of the four paradigms.

Four Predominant Models of Catholic and Faith-Based Aid from the West to Africa

Development and aid in Africa today, especially between Africa and the West, is still largely carried out from the logic of Western Christendom, hegemony, and convergence. Long before the convergent theory of modernity, market economy in a homogenized global order, there was Western Christendom and its attempt to make or remake the world through Christian values and Gospel-driven ethics of charity and assistance. Whereas there has been some significant shifts in mission to an understanding of the changing landscape of world Christianity with openness in some quarters to indigenous types and models of mission, development, and the affirmation of cultural diversity, the strong pull of Christendom currents is still strong in the Church today and in faith-based organizations broadly because of the unequal power relation between Africa and the Rest in terms of wealth, knowledge, institutional frameworks, technology, and digital dominance, educational training among others. The document from the Commission on World Mission and Evangelism (CWME) of the World Council of Churches, titled Together Towards Life: Mission and Evangelism in Changing Landscape, ³⁰ offers me a good starting point for analyzing Catholic charities and faith-based aid in general.

I find the five articles (38–42) on “Why Margins and Marginalization?” very helpful in unpacking what is wrong with the three of the four approaches to Catholic charities that I identify. The bold statement that ‘mission from the margins seeks to counteract injustices in life, church, and mission’ (38) introduces an important dynamic in the discourse about aid and mission. This document argues that the best agents for mission to the margins are the poor themselves, who understand how ‘exclusionary forces are threatening their survival and can best discern the urgency’ (art. 38) of the struggles more than those outside the margins. ³¹ Are we ready to hear the truth of the poor, and the sensus fidei fidelium that arises from their narratives, their struggles, and their desire to live again? The poor in Africa are not asking for handouts or shortcuts to success, but rather for the removal of the obstacles to social mobility and survival. Some of these obstacles include structural injustices, extractive political economies, unfair trade regimes, crushing debt burdens, the climate vulnerability of those who have contributed least to the crisis, and internal governance failures that deepen suffering. What the poor are asking the world is not for more aid that neuters their agency and could lead to learned helplessness, but rather the expansion of their capabilities and freedoms in tune with what Catholic Social Teaching promotes as the authentic participation of all people in shaping the common good. In Article 41, the document gives a very damning verdict on the current mission and aid regime in our world, which forms the background to what follows in the four typologies of aid in Africa today that I have developed:

The dominant expressions of mission, in the past and today, have often been directed at people on the margins of societies. These have generally viewed those on the margins as recipients rather than as active agents in missionary activity. Mission expressed in this way has too often been complicit with oppressive and life-denying systems. It has generally aligned with the privileges of the center and largely failed to challenge economic, social, cultural, and political systems, which have marginalized some people. The mission from the center is motivated by paternalism and a superiority complex. Historically, this stance has equated Christianity with Western culture and resulted in adverse consequences, including the denial of the full personhood of the victims of such marginalization.

From this starting point of mission from the margins, I clarify the ethical weaknesses embedded in contemporary Catholic development practice by distinguishing four predominant models of aid. These models are not mutually exclusive, nor are they uniquely Catholic; they describe recurring patterns across faith-based and secular development regimes. Each model embodies a particular moral imagination about Africa, agency, and power, and each reveals why the conversion demanded by the margins is not optional but urgent.

1. The Savior Model: Paternal Charity and Moral Spectacle

This model has its origin in the missionary period and the slavery and post-slavery period of African history. It is structured around white saviors and white supremacy and driven by compassion and could be framed in these words: We are here to help you; and we bring you good news and will support you with our wealth: The underlying narratives imagine Africa as a site for human suffering, darkness, and misery, where people will die without the rescue operation of white saviors. Missionary propaganda and fundraising campaigns helped circulate this image in the past, while contemporary faith-based humanitarian appeals continue to replicate these visual images of hopeless Africa and images of malnourished children and women. It is sad to note that, unlike in other parts of the world, the consent of the poor in Africa is never obtained before circulating their images. I remember, as seminarians, that some of us were asked to send pictures to the diocese for use in soliciting subvention for our education, without our consent or any explanation of how our pictures would be used. This pattern continues today in many ecclesial charitable works in Africa.

These images emerge from a single narrative of Africa as a basket case and a world poverty center, without regard for Africa's broader structural context. These images reflect paternalism and racism in Africa through the law of unintended consequences. They also project a very negative and condescending infantilization of Africans. This model leads to poorly thought-out aid without a clear strategy or plan; no mutually agreed-upon measurable outcomes determined equally by the donor and the recipients; it confuses ends and means, prioritizing urgency and short-term benefit over long-term engagement with local communities. Africans have no hand in this kind of aid or mission except as consumers of goods and services. Western donors who support these charities are satisfied with pictures of suffering people receiving their aid or the results of the interventions of faith-based charities and do not bother about long term result nor do they maintain a respectful and mutual ongoing relationship with recipients; it is rather a cyclical and annual narrative of the same story, the same social condition, and often with greater magnification of the dire consequences of failing to act to move people to donate their money.

However, the Savior model is unsustainable for both the givers and the recipients. Donors, over time, grow fatigued by the unending cycle of requests that only demonstrate the failure of the savior model to change Africa's social conditions by strengthening and supporting the people's agency. Local communities are also passive recipients of aid and do not participate in the process, as they are considered needy in this model. Without participatory practices by local communities, there is no sustainable and transformative development. without staying longer with the pain of those suffocating under the weight of global injustice and oppressive local structures, there can be no sustainable integral development and escape from poverty for those at the margins of history. William Easterly's critique of development “planners” versus “searchers” captures part of this dynamic. ³² Planners design large-scale interventions premised on technical expertise and moral urgency. However, they frequently fail to account for local knowledge and institutional complexity. In the African ecclesial settings, what we see for the most part are project cycles that prioritize visible outputs like schools, wells, and clinics, without sustained attention to local ownership or governance capacity. What is wrong here is not the charity of Western donors or the projects being built, but rather the asymmetrical relationship that is predominant in the savior model, its interventionist character, and its short-term vision. While the logic that humanitarians should work themselves out of a job by supporting communities to stand on their feet is valid, the savior model actually does the opposite of addressing problems urgently and quickly, and voids communities of their agency, leaving them soon without building a strong partnership or a strong framework for local ownership and governance. Projects are built for the people, not with the people, violating the old axiom that informed the synodal life of the church: nothing about me without me. Charity, in this model, becomes a series of episodic performances, “more concerned about institutional preservation” rather than an act of solidarity and a covenantal accompaniment built both on the Gospel and a core principle of Catholic Social Doctrine on the ordination of all earthly goods to human and cosmic flourishing for earth and all its inhabitants. ³³

2. The Hierarchical Model: Managerial Paternalism.

Unlike the Savior Model's episodic charity, this model presents itself as more professional, mature, developed, strategic, and institutional. It proceeds from this logic: We (western faith-based organizations, development experts and humanitarians) know what you need and how you can meet your needs through us, and we will teach you how to access and use our aid, because your church structures and systems are weak; we need also to build your capacity to align it with our own models and systems. We have the best practice, and you are struggling because you do not have our kind of system and organizational structure. Particularly in Catholic Church charities, this model fits into the enduring mission mindset that Africa is still an immature or young church always in need of help, direction, and support.

In this model, donors define strict terms and conditions for receiving support, thereby providing funding while also dictating best practices, project management, and reporting frameworks. Donors set the agenda through the strategic priorities, benchmarks, key performance indicators, measurable indicators, and the leadership competencies they require of African experts. In some cases, African partners are sent to receive training in the donor's country, or such training and seminars are offered to Africans in certain parts of Africa, depending on the funding agency's preferences. Donors not only define the type of governance they want for successful grants and cooperation, but they also put in place the governance structures, the financial management protocols, and satisfactory compliance protocols and regimes that must be in place before funding is approved.

This structure sidelines local knowledge, agency, kinship ties, and communal social capital on which grassroots community mobilization and wealth creation have been built in African communities and churches. Managerial paternalism holds that the person who pays the piper dictates the tune. This hierarchical framework bears a striking resemblance to the structural compliance frameworks historically imposed on African states by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as conditions for loans and aid. Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) in the 1980s and 1990s required privatization, deregulation, austerity, and governance reforms as prerequisites for financial support. Without a critical edge, one may judge these externally imposed frameworks both rational and necessary. Still, it raises serious questions about the intention and goals to be achieved when African pastoral and social agents, and the local ecclesial structures they run, are disciplined to conform to external directions within a very colonial framework that masks domination through the assertion of good intentions. In some cases, it sees problems where there are none and forces local pastoral agents even to question their own agency, ability, competence, and systems. I admit that the Lord demands of us to be good stewards of the earthly goods, which requires accountability and competence. I also admit that stewardship requires putting structures in place to avoid corruption, opacity, or incompetence. The concern here is a fundamental question: who defines the norm? Who determines what counts as “best practice”? Who sets the metrics by which success is judged? And whose knowledge is treated as authoritative? It is not capacity building that is unhelpful here, but managerial paternalism. When African development workers are trained to internalize donor vocabulary, metrics, logics of impact measurement, and evaluation cycles, the unmistakable message is that funding will flow only if local actors learn to dance to the tune of Western donors, with donor expectations met first while local needs come later.

Most Catholics in their diocese and many religious in their congregations have no clue how the aid is gotten in their names or how it is accounted for. It is like what happens in the state in Africa: Ask most Africans how their governments got them into the debt burden, how the loan was negotiated, the terms and conditions, when it was received, and how it is administered—they have no idea. Donors train project directors and, in some cases, define the terrain, create the need or goals they wish to promote, and invite African churches to apply because they know what Africans need or can determine what African churches should focus on. This is the same thing that Western governments do when they operate on the assumption that working with African governments means aid will reach ordinary people. Unfortunately, what is true of the governments in Africa is also true of most church leaders in Africa: so much hope but little results; massive paperwork showing accountability, but little evidence on the ground of life being changed. Accountability flows upward to donors rather than horizontally to local stakeholders, and people with low incomes are reduced to clients. ³⁴ Financial transparency is often oriented toward satisfying external audits rather than cultivating participatory budgeting within the ecclesial community. Structural reliance on foreign funding can weaken incentives for local stewardship, entrepreneurship, and shared responsibility. It also creates temptations for upward accountability and downward corruption; local intermediaries can feed fat on aid money while ordinary people remain poor.

The first challenge with this model is that it involves few people, and there is both a hierarchy from the funder or donor and a hierarchy in the receiving and hosting church or institutions. The assumption that Western managerial models are universally transferable and normatively superior reflects what Ilan Kapoor identifies as the universalization of Western institutional rationality in development discourse. ³⁵ Even well-intentioned capacity-building can encode a hierarchy of knowledge: Western expertise is exported, while African dioceses and congregations must relativize their own experience and adapt to it. Secondly, this hierarchical power pyramid weakens the local churches. This is because it extends from Western episcopal conferences, funding agencies, and religious orders to high-ranking church officials in Africa, who mediate resources to dioceses, parishes, and local communities. The mediation is often sincere and sacrificial, but decision-making authority remains concentrated at the top of the pyramid in both donor and recipient contexts; the poor are invisible.

Local institutional realignments could become alienating and harmful to local agency and ownership. Diocesan priorities begin to shift not because of discernment with the faithful but because funding categories require alignment; priests and bishops become grant writers and project managers rather than pastors and local grassroots evangelizers. In many instances, parish structures and initiatives are restructured to fit donor reporting cycles rather than the pastoral needs of their people, which have their own rational and local rhythm. Religious congregations may prioritize fundable projects over those that are most contextually pressing. Research shows that the hierarchical approach or managerial paternalism is counterproductive. Transparency International and World Bank governance indicators have repeatedly shown that aid contexts with limited participatory oversight are vulnerable to corruption and weak institutional trust. ³⁶ This critique also applies to faith-based charities. However, our goal here is neither to romanticize local leadership nor to demonize foreign donors. African churches, like all churches, face internal governance challenges, clericalism, nepotism, clannishness, tribalism, and mismanagement of funds. Western agencies, like all institutions, operate within regulatory environments that demand compliance and measurable outcomes. The issue here is not accountability per se, but asymmetrical accountability and the unilateral standard-setting in which one side gives orders, and the other implements them.

The ethical question here, however, concerns synodality, participation, communion, mutual respect, and co-responsibility. The Church is not an NGO or a corporation, but the Body of Christ. The Synod on Synodality rightly has emphasized the participation of the faithful as constitutive of ecclesial life. In this regard, creating rigid funding structures that bypass participatory discernment, in which the poor and local communities are involved as primary stakeholders, contradict the very anthropology and shared participation that Catholic social teaching defends. If the marginalized are to be protagonists of mission and history, then they cannot be perpetual apprentices in someone else's managerial system. A mature Church does not emerge through adapting to foreign and often alienating benchmarks and external bureaucratic systems and protocols. Local churches grow by focusing on their own assets and discovering what is working for them and how to get more of it, and what is not working well and how to improve it. This requires a critical and honest assessment of their own systems, and the application of local knowledge and dialogue with external funders and friends on what must be improved.

The hierarchical model may be an improvement on the Savior Model. Still, it mediates a subtler, more colonizing framework that perpetuates dependencies not only in terms of material resources but also in weakening local leadership through an aid-compliant disciplinary regime. While it does not aestheticize Africa's suffering or fetishize the poor, its insistence on externally imposed disciplinary regimes robs local church leaders of authentic subjectivity, accountability to their own people, and creative imagination in designing locally driven, asset-based participatory practices to improve people's lives. Without reforming the hierarchical aid model and reconfiguring power for shared governance, co-responsibility, and respect for the principle of subsidiarity, this model risks sustaining the same pattern of dependency cycles that Jonathan Bonk identifies as embedded in the missionary legacy. ³⁷

The Benevolent Interventionist Model: Crisis-Driven Humanitarianism

This is the ad hoc approach that emerges in response to crises such as war, famine, epidemics, and climate-induced disasters. When a crisis breaks out in Africa, kind-hearted people from within Africa and outside Africa often mobilize rapidly and heroically to provide humanitarian relief. The Christian faith invites us in the face of human suffering, to enter into the chaos and suffering of others, bringing healing, offering succor, and saving lives as the Good Samaritan did. Suffering is ubiquitous in the world today, and faith-based charities are often the last person standing during wars, outbreaks of diseases, or natural disasters because they embrace standing with the wounded and lifting them as a moral imperative. What is problematic is when emergency relief becomes a permanent relationship, as if Africa is perpetually a crisis-ridden continent. Human suffering indeed continues unabated in Africa, but there are signs of hope and new sites for reimagining the future. But it seems that many faith-based organizations in Africa have been tailored to deal more with emergencies than with development; to address the symptoms of social problems rather than the structural conditions of poverty and the unbroken cycle of suffering and pain on the continent. This model contradicts the well-developed principles now in the humanitarian sector, which hold that even in the most difficult conditions, people should be involved in their own healing or restoration, even in the worst of times, people should be protagonists, not simply neutered subjects without any exercise of agency or capability. The Sphere Handbook explicitly treats participation and dignity as core humanitarian commitments. ³⁸ When aid arrives as a package delivered to silent and helpless recipients, it may keep bodies alive while weakening agency and long-term resilience. This model of charity in Africa fails to distinguish between needs and assets; between reactive and proactive approaches; and between short-term and long-term goals, sustainable and non-sustainable practices.

Africa has become a very fertile ground for the proliferation of Western Christian aid groups, which continue to grow exponentially, sometimes competing among themselves for funds abroad and for relevance in Africa. In one community in Uganda alone, I found more than 7 Western Christian Faith-Based Charities (FBOs) providing the same intervention aid and services. Crisis-driven intervention also multiplies fragmentation. What is evident to all those interested in the humanitarian sector in Africa is that, while faith-based groups are growing in number in Africa and the West, suffering and crises continue to increase. It stands to reason that the aid ecosystem in many African countries, with overcrowded NGOs, points to a troubling reality: why aren't they working together? Why are they duplicating efforts with little results? Who is benefiting from the growth in the aid market in Africa? ³⁹

The same problem was identified by the UN in 2006 in its “Delivering as One” reform agenda, which identified duplication and fragmentation among UN agencies as a major obstacle to development and results, due to high overheads that weaken strategic focus and coordination among its agencies. In the same vein, in most African countries, faith-based charities follow the same pattern with aid, development, and charitable activities: wasting donors’ resources, duplicating work, and flooding the aid market. One must then ask: Are these Christian mission aid groups helping to bring about the reign of God, or are they hindering its realization? Research on aid effectiveness also yields similar findings: donor fragmentation undermines bureaucratic quality and destabilizes institutions in the recipient country. ⁴⁰

Given these limiting factors, the benevolent model requires reform. It stands to reason that multiplying charitable groups in Africa who pursue overlapping agendas without coordination, subsidiarity, or shared strategic vision also leads to African churches and FBOs doing the same: locally creating more competing FBOs and diocesan and congregational entities all trying to outdo each other in the search for donor money. This leads to institutional density, a lack of national-level harmonization, and mission drift and incoherence. This rivalry among local and international charities undermines accountability, turning the poor, sadly, into objects in the struggle for funding.

From an ethical standpoint, no one questions the good intentions of donors, who all desire a better world for all, especially the poor. However, I contend that we must examine our practices in the light of justice and structural transformation, because mitigating immediate suffering without confronting the structures only postpones the doomsday and sinks the poor into deeper precarity. The path to reforming this model is the critical consciousness of change agents, which requires them to recognize that their efforts to help Africa might unintentionally hurt Africa by habituating communities to externally driven solutions and fostering a learned helplessness that leaves intact the deeper forms of structural violence that constrain agency. We do not propose here that the poor be abandoned to their fate, especially when disaster strikes. What we are proposing is a disciplined structural analysis and morally accountable intervention that stays longer with the pains and wounds of people and engages simultaneously with responding to humanitarian needs while contesting the normalization of unjust systems and embodying, in concrete practice, the liberating love of God while embracing the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. It is an invitation to move from pitying Africa or encouraging self-pity among Africans to a shared sense of moral outrage at the systems that perpetuate human suffering in Africa and around the world, and to an awakening of ethical consciousness and responsibility to dismantle the structures of sin and suffering that manufacture death for the poor. When rightly ordered, such simultaneous engagement strengthens capacities and freedom on both sides while enabling the most vulnerable to respond freely and creatively to grace as historical subjects of their own transformation. ⁴¹

The Participatory Partnership Model: Toward Triple C

The fourth model is captured in an African proverb: a bird cannot fly with one wing; you cannot clap with one hand. It involves three interrelated commitments: cooperation, collaboration, and co-responsibility. When partners co-operate, they work together to interpret problems and identify challenges, opportunities, and gifts through shared discernment, all the while respecting local agency and knowledge. Collaboration among partners involves mutual trust and respect that lead to mutual relationships and exchange, in which partners recognize their vocation to responsible stewardship of the earth's resources through solidarity, working together to seek solutions and best practices for improving the quality of life of people and building sustainable structures around the assets of the poor. Collaboration within the faith-based sector always begins with the spirituality of hope and abundance rather than one partner seeing the other through a deficit frame. Finally, co-responsibility demands that partners hold each other mutually accountable. What donors communicate to their patrons at home must be done with moral integrity and respect for the dignity of the poor, whose images cannot be used without their permission. Local partners must be accountable not only for funds received but above all to the primary stakeholders, especially the poor. A transparent, participatory, and honest accountability to the poor, as the icons of Christ, is the first basis of stewardship and of any successful project. This model aligns more closely with Catholic social teaching's emphasis on participation and the common good and on the Synod on Synodality's proposal of the relationship between churches as a mutual gift exchange. This model affirms that those on the margins best understand the forces threatening their survival and can most clearly discern the urgency. ⁴² It draws from the framework of principles on aid effectiveness articulated in the Paris Declaration, which includes ownership, alignment, harmonization, managing for results, and mutual accountability as the path to sustainable and integral development and the advancement of communities. ⁴³

There is a need to deepen the ethical foundation of Catholic charities, especially in transforming power, not simply reforming procedures and protocols, but the very structure of power among all stakeholders in international development. The ethical renewal of Catholic development requires moving beyond typology toward a reconfiguration of relational power itself. The decisive question remains: are we prepared to decentralize power? Are we ready to hear the margins not as a problem to be solved but as a truth and treasure that must be received? Are we ready for ecclesial conversion? Are we ready to dismantle paternalistic reflexes, confront internal corruption, harmonize fragmented efforts, and design relationships that reflect the communion of the Triune God? Are we ready to distinguish needs from assets? Are we ready to focus our gaze not on our power but on the struggles of our brothers and sisters and their resilience, where the breath of the spirit is potentiating new movements and momentum of reversal? Are we ready to listen to the wisdom of people experiencing poverty rather than turning them into performative partners who must trick or play along with donors to secure resources from whichever aid organization offers them the most money? ⁴⁴

What is needed today is a mutual recognition that the mission today is from everyone to everywhere and requires mutual accountability; both African and Western partners need to prove themselves to each other in a trusting relationship, but they both stand before God as stewards who are accountable to God and to the poor, who are the icons of Christ for whom the charity is meant. The wisdom and treasures of God are scattered like mustard seeds among God's people all over the world. The Catholicity of the Church is reflected in a significant way as the Final Document of the Synod on Synodality proposes when churches see each other as “a network of relationships which prophetically propagates and promotes a culture of encounter, social justice, inclusion of the marginalized, communion among peoples and care for the earth, our common home “ (n.121). What is emerging in this era of world Catholicism is the Church of the sheaves as an ecclesial image that points to a rich harvest and exchange of gifts that needs to be better managed for many reasons.

First, fidei donum practice was encouraged by successive popes and has been a source of joy and missionary exchange, in most cases from Europe to the rest of the world until Vatican II, and since the 1970's, a reverse mission from the Global South to the West. However, in many instances, these exchanges are not properly designed, nor are the bishops and church leaders on both sides well prepared for this exchange and partnership. While many principles have been developed over time for these gift exchanges, there is no proper and adequate formation for both the sending and receiving churches, the missionaries, and the people who are being missioned. Second, the exchange taking place in the Church is often seen as a one-way relationship, characterized by asymmetrical power nodes that minimize the contributions of the giving Church and the relationship's mutuality. When missionaries were sent from Europe to Africa, Latin America and Asia in the recent past, there was an attempt to understand the mission as a mutual exchange: a missionary is not only a sharer of the Good News in the missionary field, they are also receiving some Good News from the people in the missionary field that can enrich their own people in the sending Church. The mutual exchange of gifts, wherein everyone is both a giver and a receiver, is the kind of reform needed in Catholic charity, which also demands resisting the reductionism that often characterizes this exchange as one in which some give, and others receive. Mutuality of exchange is the heart of this fourth model; it is also a requirement of ecclesial communion and love.

Towards a Trinitarian Reconfiguration of Power in Catholic International Charities

The movement from typology to ethical diagnosis brings us to the central question: what kind of power structures Catholic international charity today, and what kind of power reconfiguration could trigger the process of decolonizing it? Across the four predominant models—Savior, Hierarchical, Benevolent Interventionist, and Participatory Partnership—the deepest ethical fault line concerns power: who defines need? Who sets priorities? Who controls resources? Who narrates success? Who bears risks? When ecclesial solidarity is mediated through unexamined hierarchies, it conflicts with the baptismal equality affirmed in the Church's own doctrine. At the center of all these is the architecture of power: who has more power and why? Who has less power and why? Whose interest is being served? Whose interest is neglected? Who is benefiting from the system, and who are the losers? It is important, then, to examine the moral logic of power itself to demonstrate the possibility of reforming Catholic international charities through a Trinitarian model of relationship and gift-exchange. I will employ Augustine here and draw on some of his principles in Pope Leo's Dilexi Te.

An Augustinian key for reimagining the exercise of power in Catholic development lies in his distinction between frui (enjoyment) and uti (use), and in his critique of libido dominandi in The City of God. These categories provide not only spiritual anthropology but also grammar for discerning the moral configuration of donor power and Western charitable engagement in Africa. In De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine teaches that only God is to be enjoyed (frui) for God's own sake, while all created realities are to be used (uti) as means toward communion with God. ⁴⁵ Sin consists in the reversal of this order—enjoying what should be used and using what should be enjoyed.

African poverty can become a means of donor moral satisfaction or a source of ideological battles in the moral contestations today in the West over issues of family, sexual diversity, reproductive rights, and gender issues, among others. Projects can become metrics of institutional prestige and of pro-life or pro-choice credentials. Reporting frameworks can overshadow lived relationships. In such cases, people are instrumentalized while African churches become theaters for proxy moral battles of the West. The poor are narrated, categorized, measured, and evaluated, but not genuinely encountered as co-authors of their own development. What appears to be generosity may conceal a deeper disorder of love. Here, Augustine's critique of libido dominandi sharpens the analysis. In The City of God, he contrasts the City of God with the earthly city by exposing the “lust to dominate” that animates fallen political orders. Libido dominandi is not only overt tyranny, it is also the temptation to convert the gift into an instrument of power, creating relationships of dependency in which the donor assumes the role of benefactor and teacher while the recipient is reduced to a perpetual receiver, unable to offer the gifts that God has entrusted to every people and culture. ⁴⁶