I have just finished reading this book, and in our recession problematic times, it really is an insightful consideration about foreign aid to Africa and how it has been so ineffective. I lived in Zambia for two years, and experienced first hand how aid can have both a positive and negative effect on the population. I was fortunate to work in the American Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia, employed as the administrator for the Ambassador’s Special Self Help Fund, and Democracy and Human Rights Fund. It sounds fancy, but it was an office that only funded grass-roots projects (max funding was $10,000) which had a rigorous application process to narrow down the 1000+ project applications per year to approx 40.
We saw how much simple things like putting in wells in villages could turn the life in the village around. Small mills to grind maize, enabling the women in a 50 mile radius to be able to grow, harvest and profit from a crop that would otherwise not be there. Building orphanages in villages for AID’s orphans, where the elders of the village would love and care for the children, if there was support in place – was paramount. Helping finance a the building of a huge fish pond, which would provide valuable nutrition, and future income for an entire village, keeping family units intact. Furnishing and building small schools where there were no government schools gave the children an opportunity to study at school all year long, the long rainy season, or the blazing sun no longer affected their ability to learn.
Dambisa Moyo is a Harvard and Oxford educated economist, who has worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank. She was born in Zambia, and has had the opportunity to see aid from both sides – the western need to throw money with little regard to the consequences, as long as it looks good; and also how her own country and continent’s corruption and abuses of power have reduced the effect of aid to pouring money into a bottomless pit. She challenges the altruistic view that more and more money can be the only possible solution, pointing out that the billions of dollars that have been poured into Africa since the ’70′s have all but disappeared. There is little evidence of improvement, AID’s and malaria are still the number one killers, poverty appears to have grown, rather than diminished, and well-intentioned large-scale projects designed to help sit as redundant dinosaurs on the sidelines of African Cities.
I applaud Moyo’s writing – her fearless analysis of such an impassioned subject has challenged many of the ‘experts’ and from what I saw from my short time in Africa, corruption, bureaucracy and red tape are but some of the obstacles and bottomless pits where aid money seems to disappear. Maybe in this time of major recession, it’s time to redress our aid policies.
