When Development Withdraws: Embeddedness, Responsibility and the Afterlife of Aid in Kenya

Abstract

Development interventions are commonly evaluated according to what happens
during their formally defined implementation periods: whether resources were delivered,
targets were reached, institutions strengthened and beneficiaries transitioned toward selfreliance. Such approaches can obscure what happens after external financing changes or
ends. This paper examines the afterlife of externally financed development in Kenya
through three theoretically selected cases: the Wings to Fly secondary-school scholarship
programme, tuberculosis (TB) care, and the disruption and subsequent reconfiguration of
United States-supported health financing in 2025. Drawing on documentary evidence and a
reflexive account of lived experience, the paper develops the concept of developmental
embeddedness to describe the process through which externally financed interventions
become incorporated into individual trajectories, institutional routines, professional
networks, material infrastructures and expectations of service provision.
The paper argues that embedded development does not simply disappear when its
original financing arrangement changes. Instead, external interventions can become
ordinary and therefore increasingly invisible to the people and institutions that depend upon
them. A financing disruption can consequently reveal an architecture that was previously
experienced only through its outputs: education, clinical care, medicines, laboratories,
health workers, data systems and community services. The three cases illustrate different
forms of afterlife. In Wings to Fly, responsibility can become increasingly individualised
after formal programme completion. In TB care, responsibility is distributed across
government institutions, health workers, programmes, facilities and external partners. In
the 2025 health-financing disruption, responsibility became an object of active
redistribution and negotiation among the Kenyan government, United States agencies,
multilateral institutions, implementing organisations and health-system actors.
Rather than treating aid dependence as a simple condition measured by financial
volume, the paper proposes examining what external financing becomes embedded within.
The more functions, relationships and expectations an intervention becomes incorporated
into, the more difficult it may be to identify who should sustain those functions when
financing changes. The paper therefore reframes aid withdrawal as a problem of
responsibility redistribution and institutional afterlife rather than merely program closure.