The ‘Know-How of the World is Mainly with Private Companies’: The Commonwealth Development Corporation and British Business in Post-Colonial Africa

Abstract

The connections between British overseas development aid and business in the post-colonial era have primarily been considered in relation to ‘tied aid’, and mostly with reference to the later 1970s and the 1980s when British governments sought to make British aid work more closely in support of British commercial, as well as political, interests. But an equally intimate association between British governmental aid and British business existed in relation to the activities of the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC), which had been formed in 1948 as the Colonial Development Corporation. CDC was part of the UK’s aid programme, but operated on a semi-commercial basis, being required to break even or better. The chapter principally discusses the 1960s, when Africa (continuing a trajectory from the 1950s) constituted CDC’s most important geographical region of operation, and investment in projects in collaboration with the private sector, including some of the most familiar British firms of the colonial era, became an increasingly significant part of CDC’s portfolio. There was no formal requirement that in its choice of private sector partners CDC favour British firms over companies of other national origin, and the award of CDC funding was not tied to the purchase of British goods or services. However, the chapter argues that there was a broad understanding that British aid should, where possible, benefit British trade and industry, and CDC itself instrumentalised claims that it could assist British exports in ongoing struggles with the Treasury to secure its own financial base. Analysing the relationship between CDC and British business also highlights underlying structural factors that worked in favour of British companies when the funding organisation in question was British.