A National Post interview with Dambisa Moyo;
No country on Earth has ever achieved long-term growth and reduced poverty in a meaningful way by relying on aid. It’s just never happened. So we’re pushing a strategy that has no evidence of working anywhere on Earth. And we have years of evidence that the aid strategy doesn’t work.
Well, it depends on how one measures success. Welfare has never worked to raise individuals out of poverty either, but that’s not what the modern system has evolved to do. Outside of academia, there is no more reliable a voting bloc for the left than the dysfunctional, dependent neighborhood. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
Wow, what a beautiful breath of fresh air!
I don’t know why we expect continuously giving money to people unwilling to work for it to succeed on an international level when it clearly doesn’t work on a local level. Such giving only guarantees prolonged poverty.
The people of Africa existed long before many if not all the countries that send aid today. I wonder how they managed to survive without Billions of dollars of handouts then?
The lady knows what she is talking about and makes sense to those who really look at the “root” problems.
It is a classic “feed a man a fish… teach a man how to fish…” scenario. Lend your brother a hand, not do it for him. More than one economist has said that investment capital instead of aid is the way to bring light to the dark continent.
It would be interesting how many people, other than those working in government, the NGO’s and other assorted would be do-gooders like Lewis, actually benefit from aid. A guess of less than 50% would not be out of the question.
The NGO are not really a non government organizations, they are proxies for the government for spending aid money that the government then can say “they did not do it”.
The lady is of course right in saying that those that run these shows are the ones that end up with most of the cash. You may say that those, that the aid is supposed to aid get the baskets full of leftovers.
There is a youtube interview by Mothercorp. with this woman you can access from her website.
Texas Canuck at 9:47am puts it well.
Shovelling cash at problems infantilizes people, companies, and governments.
The poverty industry will be loath to give up it’s hold on the lazy, stupid and miserable. For thousands of Canadians it’s their career. Sort of like being an undertaker for the living dead.
Africans need to be able to sell their products to the rest of the world and the what killed their agricultural exports, which they certainly can produce, was the protection farm lobby in Europe among others.
At least that’s the story I heard. Sooooo, if we cut off Africa, and are willing to be a market for them, (Europe too) it might work just fine. They can also export a lot of textile as well.
The downside is that a lot of rock musicians will have to find some other place to vent their guilt.
The old adage “someones intelligence is judged by how much they agree with you” seems to fit.
As long as I can remember “we” have been pouring aid money into Africa and all we have to show for it is a bunch of very rich dictators.
It might not hurt to show this article to eastern Canada. Of the thirteen years I spent there it seems that 50% of provincial electioneering was who could get the most welfare money out of Ottawa. Has it been translated into French?
The CBC had an interview with Lewis and Moyo this morning. Sort of a precursor to to-night. He agreed with just about everything she was saying. He said he was closer to Bono than Geldoff but both were unrealistic and primarily it was self interest. I think he knows he cannot truly disagree with her and focused mainly on AIDS and the Ethiopian famine of long ago. She maintains you have to hold the governments accountable for their actions and there is no one solution to the problems faced by the different countries.
The problem with Africa is an inferior primitive culture just like our first nations. It is tribal, corrupt and places no value on learning. The only export we should be sending is our culture including law, business practices and the protestant work ethic. Everything else is just money down the drain. Of course our culture is the one thing we are not allowed to export.
Left unsaid was the effect free money has on the gun budget of paranoid dictators who need to fund corruption and intimidation.
Sorry Fritz, Africans I know place a lot of value on education – perhaps more so than many here in North America. It is the access to education that is lacking. The governments have limited resources and rely on a strict series of exams to limit who advances to the next level of education. Unfortunately too many of the really bright jump through all the hoops and leave their country for good.
Any time a society has a rapid transition from stone age to modern, the culture is going to seem a little backwards as people figure out how to reconcile the old with the new.
Paul Theroux wrote a terrific book that describes the situation, “Dark Star.” NGOs are not the focus of the book, but they call attention to themselves during the course of a land-based, solo transit of the continent from Cairo to Cape Town. The aid has not only leveraged dysfunctional African states, it has stripped the African people of their self sufficiency. That is the real crime.
Moyo reiterates a point made by Thomas Sowell years ago in his book, The Economics and Politics of Race. Foreign “aid” is frequently not aid but simply foreign transfer payments and should be called such. The money transfers often serve to prop up corrupt, oppressive regimes which simply perpetuate or exacerbate the dysfunction. I’m sure Moyo would be a fascinating speaker to hear.
Speedy writes: “The CBC had an interview with Lewis and Moyo this morning. …I think he knows he cannot truly disagree with her….”
Quite so, but it didn’t stop the sanctimonious windbag Lewis from his characteristically arrogant and indignant attacks on every government that he failed to become part of. Because decolonization didn’t quite work out as the brochure promised, he and other leftists have been busy searching for scape-goats, and they always seem to be found among his political rivals.
Harper, as usual, is out ahead of the curve by changing the aid focus for Africa to select countries that are democratic and making the effort to move into 21st century. Only those countries that meet this criteria will receive Canada’s hand up not hand out.
birdy, it is a poverty industry. if we dump all those who suck off the so called poor, things would be better. people who are working are much happier. also much more prosperous.
fritz. 100% right.
Untrue, Taiwan is a graduate of US AID, for that matter Japan, Europe, and South Korea have benefited greatly from aid.
Fritz at 12.20
Exactly. I also think you must add another tribal culture to the list of failures. The culture in the Arabian Peninsula is full of tribalism and clans.
Chui at 1.19
I beg to disagree. The Africans I have seen place value on credentials (the act of having obtained some letters after your name). Being educated, in the sense of having learned something, is of lesser importance. Get the credentials. Get the Government job. Get the rest of the family and clan looked after. And look at the new South African leader. He has a grade 3 education.
I will agree that education is a huge part of the solution – if only to teach the factory system of regularly showing up on a scheduled time in rain or sunshine and producing learnings. But Fritz is right – if they want to look like us (or if our rock stars want them to live like us), they need to act like us and what is needed is the rule of law.
Tony at 8.44
What kind of aid, for how long and into what kind of a culture? I think you will find that a lot of the aid was military support for short periods of time compared to what has happened in Africa.
This lady is not saying “no aid.” She says wean them off the hand outs. Help them stand on their own two feet. The end result has got to be some element of self sustaining development – not a self perpetuating industry of charity.
Re: “The problem with Africa is an inferior primitive culture …”
True, but Western nations had “inferior primitive cultures” not so long ago. 1939-45 comes to mind, not to mention up to 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Thankfully, the examples of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Dambisa Moyo prove that Africans can be as thoughtful and as successful as the rest of us.
Excellent linked article!
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/story.html?id=1647433
Aid to countries, such as Taiwan, were definitely tied to the Cold War; however success, between different aid receivers, during the cold war was mixed. That’s why I mention Taiwan and others.
I completely agree with the CPCs approach. Let’s tackle aid pragmatically. Liberals are notorious for dolling money to “noble causes” trying to be a “big player”. Being a Conservative doesn’t mean dismissing aid, but doing it our way. Canada is a small, relatively wealthy nation. We can “punch at our weight”(a weight we decide, not Bono).
Divorcing trade, or as the mainstream media describes “interests”, seems irrational, hence non-ending charity. Ofcourse, “interests” should be tied to any aid. Even as a Liberal (which I am not), focusing aid seems the best approach. If, or when, we would like to tackle larger issues we could either apply what we know, or give advice to those with “interests” (not a dirty word to me).