In Business Day, Adekeye Adebajo, the executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution, Cape Town, takes the gloves off in criticising Dambisa Moyo’s book, Dead Aid:
… This is a work of self-flagellating simplicity, totally devoid of any thinking by leading African research centres or scholars, making the book often read like a Harvard Masters syllabus or a World Bank report. Moyo reveals her ignorance by incredibly charging that “scarcely does one see Africa’s … officials … offer an opinion on what should be done”. …
Moyo employs crude stereotypes of “tribal conflict” to depict African wars, and recklessly suggests that aid is “an underlying cause of social unrest, and possibly civil war”. Such an absurd link would, of course, involve a huge leap of logic, and the author’s ignorant blaming of Somalia’s civil war on competition for food aid completely ignores the decade-long homicidal campaign of US-backed autocrat, Siad Barre, which eventually led to rebellion in 1991.
My own review is here (pdf) – also critical, but less vituperative.
More reviews (including some which are less negative) of Dead Aid here.
My sister was sent this card. I thought it was funny.
Please do send a goat to Africa this Christmas. It will change somebody’s life, and it will make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Or you can send cow.
I promise you that either will add more happiness to the world than a High School Musical Dance Mat.
My article on OpenDemocracy today discusses whether aid works.
Some supporters of aid have made what seem to me to be extravagant claims that aid should aim to bring about economic and social transformation of developing countries, so accelerating economic growth and industrialisation. But this is a very high bar to set. Aid may well help to increase the probability of economic take-off but there are lots of other conditions that need to be in place for the transition to an industrialised market economy to happen, and aid is not a sufficient condition (nor, probably, a necessary condition) for it to occur. Even if aid does play an important contributory role, it would be statistically very hard to demonstrate a link between aid and economic growth.
Although the effect of aid on economic growth is uncertain, there can be no doubt that aid makes a huge difference to people’s lives. Aid provides food, health care, education, clean water, financial services, and modest incomes which transform the lives of the people who receive them. You can see this both in individual families – like the girl I met in northern Amhara, pictured here, who has health care and education because of aid – and in the overall statistics, which show that there has been a vast improvement in the quality of life on almost every measure other than income.
Aid may not always transform societies, but it does enable people to live much better lives while those transformations are taking place. And that represents a huge increase in the sum of human welfare.
I believe aid could and should work much better. Living in a developing country, I see all kinds of waste and inefficiency in the aid system that makes me angry. But it makes me angry because I also see how much difference aid makes when it is used well. I would like to see aid becoming much more transparent and accountable, so that it becomes subject to evolutionary pressures to improve.
This means, by the way, that I do not subscribe to the view that the aid system should be regarded as temporary. In the UK we hope that people will be on unemployment benefit temporarily before they are able to get back to work, but we don’t expect the system as a whole to come to an end. So I think that we should expect that at least for our lifetimes, it will be right and necessary that we transfer income from the richest people in the world to the poorest people in the world. I do not know which countries will be rich, on average, in fifty years time, and which will be poor; but I expect that the world will still need, and I hope it will still have, a permanent system to help those temporarily in need wherever they happen to be.
Aid would work better in future if we accept that we will need a permanent system to provide temporary help to those who need it, and set about designing a better system to do that.
Related reading:
- Phil Vernon at openDemocracy (to which my article was a reply)
- Roger Riddell at openDemocracy
- Ranil at AidThoughts
- Chris Blattman – Could Aid Slow Growth
The Independent reports Bob Geldof’s recent trip to Ethiopia:
Though 35 per cent of Ethiopian children are malnourished, and 40 per cent are stunted when they start school, the number who die below the age of 5 is down 40 per cent on what it was 15 years ago. A shocking 381,000 children died from preventable causes last year but there is clear progress. Cases of malaria have been reduced by two-third since 2006, with the number of deaths halved thanks to the government spraying a million houses and the Global Fund and the Gates Foundation distributing a massive 20 million bednets.“Who says aid doesn’t work,” spluttered Geldof as he leaves the clinic.
George Osborne told the Conservative Party Conference eight times:
we are all in this together.
This is a powerful message.
When 15 million people face starvation in East Africa this Christmas, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When twenty thousand children die tomorrow from easily preventable and treatable diseases, purely because they don’t have enough money to buy drugs that cost cents to produce but for which we charge rich world prices, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the developing world demands proper compensation for their part of the atmosphere, which we have filled up with carbon emissions far beyond our share, resulting in the risk of destruction to entire nations, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the people of the Niger Delta demand a share of the wealth lying beneath their ground, and an end to the environmental destruction caused by our oil companies so that we can drive our cars and cool our houses, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When we complain about corruption in the developing world, forgetting that all the money that pays for those bribes comes from us, and then choose not to prosecute our own companies that pay the bribes, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When we continue to be one of the largest manufacturers and exporters of arms in the world, fuelling conflict all around the world, but are more concerned about a hundred jobs on the Isle of Wight, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When people are forced to leave their homes, their family and their country because they lack freedom or face persecution, or because they cannot find work that pays them enough to support their family, and they look for a new beginning in rich countries, and we decide how we will treat asylum seekers and immigrants, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the world’s poor demand fair payment for their coffee, cocoa, and minerals, and for their labour which provides us with the cheap clothes and electronics which we take for granted, let us say:
we are all in this together.
When the world economy recovers, companies of the rich world begin to prosper, when bankers get their bonuses again and the rich start to become richer, and we decide how to share the proceeds of that growth within and between nations, let us say:
we are all in this together.
Have a look at this video produced by the International Budget Partnership.
The video is about the way that a civil society organisation in Kenya, MUHURI, has enabled a local community in Mombassa to hold their government to account.
(Disclosure: I work on aidinfo – a small research team which promotes the adoption of open standards for the publication of detailed information about foreign aid, to enable people in developing countries to hold governments and donors to account.)
The Ethiopian Government has been running posters in the southern part of Ethiopia to warn farmers about the risk of tsetse fly (which kill cattle and cause sleeping sickness).
To reinforce the message, and to make sure that farmers know exactly what they are looking for, they have been using posters with huge images of the tsetse fly itself.*
This has, however, not had the intended effect.
Two farmers were overheard talking to each other in a local dialect in the south, having come in to town on market day and seeing the new poster:
“Thank God we don’t have huge flies like that here.”
* I don’t have a photo of the actual poster – if anyone does, I’d love to have a copy of it.
Scarlett Lion has this list. Her main advice is to keep it to a minimum.
Here is our list, intended for visitors to Ethiopia.
So apparently zip off safari shorts/trousers make you look stupid. I guess I don’t care – I think they are quite a good way to travel light in a country that is hot during the day but cool at night and there are mosquitoes in the evening.
My father was a diplomat. When he left his last post in Africa (as High Commissioner to Nigeria) to become High Commissioner to Australia, he sent a message to the then Foreign Secretary reflecting on a career spent mainly in Africa. (These messages from Ambassadors are known in Foreign-Office-speak as a despatch).
Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, he has been able to obtain a copy of this despatch, and he has published it online. At the time, it was regarded as controversial and radical. Circulation within the Foreign Office was limited.
Perhaps my judgement is clouded by filial loyalty, but today it strikes me as forward-looking and far sighted. He wrote:
Such grotesque disparities in the human condition are an inevitable source of conflict and instability. It is a century since British people ceased to be willing to tolerate massive inequality of wealth and income within their own society. The time has surely come when we should tackle an even more offensive situation in the global village.
My father made a compelling case in 1991 for doing more to ensure that Africa shares in the benefits of globalisation and rising prosperity. As he predicted, the need has become greater the longer we have neglected the challenge.
I’m proud to follow in his footsteps in demanding change; but dismayed that I have to do so. If only they had listened then we might not have to be making the same case today.
The New York Times describes what happens if women do not have access to safe abortions:
Worldwide, there are 19 million unsafe abortions a year, and they kill 70,000 women (accounting for 13 percent of maternal deaths), mostly in poor countries like Tanzania where abortion is illegal, according to the World Health Organization. More than two million women a year suffer serious complications. …
Here in Ethiopia around a third of maternal deaths are the result of unsafe abortions.
Well done to the New York Times for addressing this. Too often this problem is swept under the carpet.
In the FT debate on aid, Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, seems to be adjusting her position:
To focus on the five-year aid-reduction example that my book offered as an illustration of an exit strategy deliberately misses the point, which is that Africa desperately needs to wean off aid. Obviously, a blanket five-year plan imposed on countries with different challenges and different circumstances would be ridiculous!
One can only interpret the fact that my detractors took the five-year example at face value as wilful blindness or a complete unwillingness to see Africa in any other light than a basket case. An aid exit might take 10 years, it might take 15, but after 60 years of the aid-regime (with no concomitant job creation) surely it is better to start the conversation (and the strategy) of aid exits than not.
Indeed, cutting off aid in five years would be ridiculous. On that we are agreed. I don’t know anybody involved in aid who does not fervently wish for the day when countries are rich enough to do without aid, and who wants to give aid in ways that bring that day forward. If Dambisa Moyo is simply saying that we should all work towards removing the need for aid, then I am not sure why there is such a fuss.
So what made us think that Dr Moyo was advocating a five year plan to reduce aid? Perhaps it was remarks like these in just about every known newspaper:
In the book I actually prescribe that they should, with immediate effect or in the very near foreseeable future, implement a five-year plan where they systematically reduce aid to these countries.
Or perhaps it is because she says this in Dead Aid (p144):
What if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call (agreed upon by all their major aid donors – the World Bank, Western countries etc), telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off, permanently? Although exceptions would be made for isolated emergency relief such as famine and natural disasters, aid would no longer attempt to address Africa’s generic economic plight.
You can see why some people got the impression that Dr Moyo was proposing that aid should be shut off after 5 years. But it is reassuring to know that this was not her position, or at any rate it is no longer her position.
Even with her new cuddlier policy of turning off the taps more gently, there is still a lot of wild and unsubstantiated garbage in her book – for example, this:
The problem is that aid is not benign – it’s malignant. No longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact, aid is the problem.
Here is my review of Dead Aid. Here are some other reviews. Andrew Pickering at Global Dashboard has a good summary of the debate so far.
Here in Ethiopia it is common for little children to shout ferenj when they see a white face. I am told that this comes from the Amharic word for a French person, ፈረንሳዊ (pronounced färänsawi), because French people were among the first white people Ethiopians had seen.
Today G and I were running down a dirt track through a small village and a small girl, about 4 years old, saw us running past. She shouted,
China! China!
I heard the other day that there were two old men sitting on a hillside in north Wello, watching the Chinese labourers building a new road. They were old-timers, who had fought against the Italians in 1935, and then watched the Italians build the first roads across the Blue Nile gorge and up to Eritrea. (“What have the Romans ever done for us?”) As these men watched the Chinese roll out the tarmac, one of them said to the other:
The Italians are back. Only now they have narrower eyes.
… I lost my young sister. She died of HIV-related complications. She should still be alive today since she was on ARVs.
But ARVs go hand in hand with good nutrition. My sister could not afford proper daily meals since she was looking after a large extended family. Besides her three children, she was looking after six double orphans that our elder brother left behind.
Her story is commonplace in Zambia. The HIV and AIDS pandemic can be mitigated by people having proper access to medicines and food. Both have become bigger problems in the current world economic crisis.
It is such situations that prompt those of us in civil society to redouble our efforts to do more advocacy work, asking our governments, in Africa, not only to be accountable to the people, but to prioritise issues of poverty and unemployment in their economic policy frameworks.
Our governments, though, are also limited in their capacity to cope with the severe effects of the global economic crisis. This is where the rich countries come in. They should remain committed to their aid promises.
Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, writes about aid in today’s Financial Times:
Dambisa Moyo’s controversial book, Dead Aid, has given us an accurate evaluation of the aid culture today. The cycle of aid and poverty is durable: as long as poor nations are focused on receiving aid they will not work to improve their economies. Some of Ms Moyo’s prescriptions, such as ending all aid within five years, are aggressive. But I always thought this was the discussion we should be having: when to end aid and how best to end it.
… Often, aid has left recipient populations unstable, distracted and more dependent; as Ashraf Ghani, the former finance minister of Afghanistan, has pointed out, it can even sever the relationship between democratically elected leadership and the populace.
It seems to me that Dambisa Moyo has set up a false dichotomy between aid and entrepreneurship. Many of the things Moyo would like to see – better access to financial services, a better business environment, lower tariffs – can be (and are) supported by aid. We can and should use aid to support the growth of an entrepreneurial society; and we can and should use aid to support people in developing countries to enable them live better lives while the benefits of that economic growth are coming through.
My review of Dead Aid is here.
Kagame’s position is more nuanced than Moyo’s argument. He seems to be calling for a different kind of support from outside:
We appreciate support from the outside, but it should be support for what we intend to achieve ourselves. No one should pretend that they care about our nations more than we do; or assume that they know what is good for us better than we do ourselves. They should, in fact, respect us for wanting to decide our own fate.
… While this is encouraging, we know the road to prosperity is a long one. We will travel it with the help of a new school of development thinkers and entrepreneurs, with those who demonstrate they have not just a heart, but also a mind for the poor.
This is striking stuff from the President of one of the most aid dependent countries in the world, in which foreign aid is about $55 per person per year, or more than 25% of GDP.
BraveNewTraveler describes the six characters you’ll meet at every expat bar.
It’s never hard to find your way there – all you need to do is follow the American music which is old enough to feel stale without being old enough to feel hip and look for a chalkboard sign advertising a European football match.
It is pretty funny (take no notice the censorious commenters who say that it is too cynical). I find it all too easy to recognise (and laugh at) myself:
1. The Overpaid Aid Worker
You can easily pick out this character by the imported beer on his table and the way he litters his speech with acronyms: USAID, NGO, MFI, MPP.
If it’s a weekday night, he might nurse his beer while tapping away on his MacBook, shooting off emails to his friends in D.C., or maybe to the alumni listserve of a bastion of East Coast higher education.
This year he’s empowering women in Latin America, but two years ago he was working on democracy promotion in Bangladesh, and next year it’s off to Thailand to oversee microfinance development.
Is there any world problem this whiz can’t solve on a two-year contract, armed only with his cushy salary, company car, and housing stipend?
Before you get a chance to answer that, though, he will: there’s “real progress” being made at the “grass roots level” with his current initiative. Another European microbrew, please!
Hat tip: @bloodandmilk on Twitter
Scarlett Lion writes about girls in Liberia.
This is how Janice Pratt begins addressing her peers. She’s a slight girl with a strong voice that says to anyone willing to listen: I’m going to be someone.
I am always struck whenever I travel in developing countries how similar people all around the world are in their ambitions and dreams.
The last ten years has been a remarkable experiment in using official development assistance (ODA) as a motor for development in Africa (and other developing countries too). It has been a bonanza for the aid industry and especially the favoured elements such as HIV/AIDS, which have often found themselves in the remarkable situation in which resource availability is not a binding constraint.… But, aid seems to displace the other parts of the development debate. Of the other pillars, only debt relief has seen any significant progress in the last ten years. Trade reform and economic governance are much harder, and far less progress has been made.
Aid donors and recipients alike have good reason for preferring to focus on aid rather than trade or governance.
I see two things wrong with this argument.
First, it has not been a bonanza for aid. We have just about recovered aid volumes to the level they were before they collapsed at the end of the cold war. We are still talking about 20 cents per person in poverty per week in Africa. It is hardly a lot of money.
Second, I understand the argument that aid may have been a displacement activity for rich countries unable or unwilling to make progress on issues such as trade, reducing conflict, a fair deal on climate change, or extending migration opportunities. I agree that these issues are important – and that they are potentially more important than aid. But I am much less clear that there really is a trade-off between aid and making progress on these issues. How do we know?
Alex is making a bold claim that aid has delayed progress on these issues. Given the enormous good that aid does, the people who call for governments to pay less attention to aid had better be sure that this really will unblock progress on the other policy issues that will compensate for the loss of aid that will result. I am not so sure that they are right.
Jean Herskovits says that the Obama administration should adopt a hippocratic Africa policy
The past decade of U.S. Africa policy has made some wish most for policies that would “first, do no harm.” A Hippocratic test could be useful for President Obama’s new Africa team at the NSC and the State Department, as they reflect on the harm that has punctuated their predecessors’ policies towards many African countries.
I’m more in favour of a hippocratic policy than a hypocritical one. But though “first, do no harm” it is often cited as a valuable guiding principle, when you think about it is not a very good rule of thumb. (In many respects there are parallels with the so-called “precautionary principle”, which also strikes me as heavily overrated as a guiding light.)
Suppose someone had argued as follows in 1994: “Intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda might do harm. We don’t fully understand Rwandan politics, and we don’t know how to disengage from a military intervention. Our rule is: first, do no harm. Therefore we will not intervene to prevent the genocide.” Interesting argument, wrong answer.
Actually, Anthony Lake (President Clinton’s National Security Adviser) did say something a bit like that. He said on May 5 1994:
We have to ask the hard questions about where and when we can
intervene. And the reality is that we cannot often solve other people’s
problems; we can never build their nations for them …”
The literal application of the hippocratic rule prevents policy-makers from taking risks where there is a possibility of doing harm but where the good could massively outweigh it. If we adopt a policy of never doing harm, we will limit the amount of good we can do.
The following seem to me good principles:
- think about the wider and long term consequences of your decisions
- only do things were the good is likely to outweigh the harm
- where possible limit the harm you do
That said, I agree with Ms Herskovits that the US has made policy mistakes in Nigeria, Kenya and Somalia. The answer is not the Hippocratic Oath but more often choosing values and long-term interest in democracy and peace over short term strategic considerations.
New website from the Royal African Society, African Arguments, with some really good contributors:
we promise to make African Arguments Online the site of the most vigorous debates on Africa available on the web.
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