Foreign aid, an exercise in personal branding?

Today most developed and some developing countries give foreign aid. Why? Is this simply a branding exercise? An attempt by government's to increase their prestige as the 'good guys'?

The UK (and many other countries) give a substantial amount of their foreign aid to India, a country with its own space programme and more billionaires than the UK. This leads me to wonder whether foreign aid is simply being used as an attempt to increase the recipient country's 'recall' of its donors when making economic and political decisions. The significance of this is given weight by the fact that increasing a country's economic and political status, will subsequently increase its effective demand of a donor country's 'brand' for economic and political purposes.