Signing documents: Accountability politics and racialized suspicion in Africa's development audits

Abstract

Good governance policies in international development require nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to translate their programs into documents that render NGOs knowable and accountable to their donors. Drawing on multisited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and Uganda, we examine the signatures on these documents and the labor of NGO staff to obtain the signatures of aid recipients. We argue that signatures serve as mechanisms that NGO staff use to make their good governance practices traceable and to deter donor suspicion of funding misuse. Staff dedicate significant energy to imagining how signatures may or may not trigger donor suspicion. We posit that despite NGO staff's anxiety over getting signatures right—present, matching, and signed by the correct person—signatures can only ever defer donor suspicion. Such suspicion cannot be eliminated because it is deeply entrenched in racialized logics that position Global North donors as holding expertise and African NGOs as susceptible to corruption. Because NGO staff worry about donor suspicion rather than what aid recipients communicate with their (lack of) signatures, even fake signatures can circulate just as well as authentic ones. Tracing the social dynamics of collecting signatures sheds light on the racialized injustices inherent in Africa's development systems.