The existing literature shows that development finance does not always reach the people who need it the most, both within and across countries. While both the donors and recipient countries influence the subnational distribution of development finance, few have examined the two variables together. In this policy brief, I focus on the distributive politics of foreign finance in 48 countries in Africa, the region with the highest number of aid-dependent countries. To examine how donors’ preferences and recipient countries’ domestic politics affect the subnational distribution of development finance, I focus on two types of financiers and four types of regimes.
