1 post tagged “economic aid”
I apologize for not really exploring the effect that economic aid has had in Africa. So I have done a lot of digging and figured that I would shed some light on the reality of aid in Africa. Do you remember Dambisa Moyo? She is the author of Dead Aid (you should read it if you care about this sort of thing-and you should), and a rather intelligent lady.
Moyo, who earned her doctorate at Oxford and has worked for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., focuses her criticisms on low-interest loans and grants from governments and multilateral lenders. Together, these make up more than 50 percent of the national budget in many African states.
“Africa is addicted to aid,” she says. “Like any addict, it needs and depends on its regular fix, finding it hard, if not impossible, to contemplate existence in an aid-less world.”
The West has funneled $1 trillion to Africa over the past 50 years, Moyo notes. Yet more than half of sub-Saharan Africa’s 700 million people live on less than $1 a day, and the poverty rate doubled between 1981 and 2002, she says, citing World Bank figures. Real per-capita income today is lower than in the 1970s.
Cutting off aid won’t affect most Africans, Moyo argues, because they don’t have access to it to begin with; only their governments do. The continent is full of aid-funded roads and schools that stand uncompleted while government leaders ride around in brand-new Mercedes-Benzes, stuff money into foreign bank accounts and travel abroad, sometimes in private jets.
Outright grants and low-interest loans are all too easy to steal, she says. Aid makes African leaders more responsive to Western donors than to their own people and engenders conflict by making government worth fighting over, she adds.
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It is my opinion that aid needs to looked at differently. Rather than being given on the basis of promises of reform, initiatives, and improving the quality of life, I think that it has to doled on based on merit. The only entity that has been able to display large-scale, consistent progress in regards to relief in Africa has been the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They look at it like a business, and those with the best plan are awarded the aid. By tying the aid to something that is tangible, it therefore has real effects. I think that this is the only way to dole out aid in Africa, otherwise I would have to agree that we are just throwing our money away.
