Introduction

This book is about the roles, labor and everyday professional realities of experts engaged in international development work. Readers expecting to learn mainly about white NGO workers from North America or Western Europe will be disappointed. Though such individuals typically represent aid workers in scholarly research and public debate, I am interested in two other, partly overlapping groups of development experts: those involved in profit-making aid and those hailing from aid recipient countries. The first group is growing in number and influence and the second has long constituted the vast majority of aid workers. Specifically, most protagonists of this book are Kenyan, Swedish and Tanzanian practitioners who work in three institutional realms: commercial consulting firms, development finance institutions (DFIs) and foreign state aid agencies involved in both non- and for-profit assistance. In total, I have interviewed roughly 100 persons mainly representing Tanzanian grants managers working for foreign state aid agencies in Tanzania; Swedish staff managing private sector instruments at Sweden's public aid agency, Sida, in Sweden; ¹ Kenyan and Swedish consultants based in Kenya and Europe; and Kenyan and donor-country finance experts working for DFIs at headquarters and in field offices in Kenya.