May 24, 2009
The aid issue
Dead Aid is written by Dambisa Moya who is a Zambia-born author educated in the UK/US.
I have been following @dambisamoya for a day now, and have also read more about her position as well as the @dambisamoyo’s from twitter search.
Yesterday, Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University wrote this article on Huffington Post. Titled ‘Aid ironies’, he criticizes Moya, William Easterly and other aid-critics. Easterly is behind another aid-critical book ‘The White Man’s Burden‘, which along with Dead Aid surely is on my reading list now.
My comments at this point are more general.
I am happy that aid is being discussed. I am, however, happy only if this becomes a discussion how to give aid more efficiently, and not an ideological discussion of whether to give aid at all.
Of course, most Americans know little about the many crucially successful aid efforts, because Moyo, Easterly, and others lump all kinds of programs – the good and the bad – into one big undifferentiated mass, rather than helping people to understand what is working and how it can be expanded, and what is not working, and should therefore be cut back.
[The Sachs article]
This is a crucial point. As with other policy areas, we need to look at the best practices. When discussing aid, we cannot generalize all aid, but we need to take a sober look at the cases.
What I am most critical to myself is a lack of accountability and a lack of transparency when it comes to aid. The successful aid projects aren’t given enough attention – and neither are the failed ones. Why did an aid project that was meant to build wells for a city fail? Why did this project with the exact same goal succeed?
One of my pet peeves is that more organizations could perhaps use social media to talk more about their projects. Surely, it can be hard to prioritize funding for such communication practices, but I think that broadening the discussion is only healthy. We have had quite a few discussions about aid in Scandinavia as well last many years, and I think one of the general problems is that the public (the tax-payers who pay for the government-funded projects) is too often left out of the loop. Writing a yearly report of 200 pages is not effective communication.
Should we give more or less aid? I don’t know, to be honest. I don’t think it is an issue of how much to give, however, but how we give it. Let’s discuss that, and discuss how we can spread the word of what works.
Links:
* The article dated “Aid ironies” by Jeffrey Sachs. (May 24th)
* The Financial Times Arena article “Is Aid Working?” (May 24th).
* Friendfeed search “Africa +aid”
* Twitter search “Africa +aid” (Twitter search is bugged, not showing all results)
In fact, Easterly is very clear about what works (and should be expanded), and what doesn’t. So the article isn’t right.
Cool, thanks. I will read both books as soon as possible and report further here.
so glad you brought this up, raymond, as i was thinking of bringing up dambisa moyo on my blog as well after reading about her in a paper today. now i no longer feel the need to, as you have already stated what’s on my mind.
i know little about the entire situation, but it is clear that aid to africa has helped little compared with the cost. corruption is an issue, as in anywhere in the developing world. accountability, transparency and good governance are key in making aid work.
stop aid? perhaps not yet. but we can take steps to make sure that dependence on dole-outs will end someday.
Easterly posted a blistering response to Sachs on HuffPost, accusing Sachs — and rightly so — of not just twisting but misrepresenting Easterly’s positions.
Sachs has lots of good ideas. But he’s associated himself so strongly with the Millenium Goals — and with gargantuan fund-raising efforts tied politically to various initiatives under the UN umbrella — that it’s increasingly difficult to separate the politician’s spin from the academic’s best advice.
He’s doing himself and his cause a world of harm with this sort of over-the-top approach.