Slowly I turned, step by step, inch by inch... Dambisa Moyo!

Professor Dambisa Moyo has been flogging her book, Dead Aid, over the past few weeks on National Public Radio. I'm sorry, but when someone from a privileged background (OK, in Zambia) works for Goldman Sachs and the World Bank and then announces that aid doesn't work and that no one in Africa wants it, well, it just makes me ill.

Wm. Easterly and Ms Moyo to the contrary, I believe that there's a reasonable amount of evidence that aid works when it's well applied, well monitored, and well conceived. At the least, it's an arguable proposition that has been well-supported by empirical studies, even if those studies have themselves been contravened.*

More specifically, Ms Moyo says in her radio interviews that investment by the private sector will support infrastructure development and service provision, just as it does in OECD countries. Really? The autobahns of Germany were funded by the private sector? And healthcare in the UK and in France are private-sector goods that just happen to be provided to all citizens because it's a profitable undertaking?

Sure, as Ms Moyo points out, entrepreneurship, asking people what are their problems and what are their dreams is vital, supporting entrepreneurialism is vital.  But to dismiss aid in favor of entrepreneurialism when the Chinese government is essentially telling African governments and businesses, "We'll invest, and we won't ask questions," at best betrays a strong bias, and is at worst criminal. 

School completion, health care, peacekeeping, good governance--these are all areas in which aid has been proven at least provisionally to be efficient and effective. Infrastructure development, as I see it, is challenging because there are huge sums being wagered in countries that have few checks on nepotism, kick-backs and privateering. To argue, as Ms Moyo does, that aid should be rejected in favor of private-sector development is to argue, really, that the rich should get richer both at home and abroad, while the poor should pound salt.


* From the NY Times review of White Man's Burden: Easterly acknowledges that not all foreign aid has failed. In public health and school attendance, where results are relatively easy to measure, focused efforts have made a huge difference. The easier it is to see whether aid is working, he argues, the more likely it is to succeed.