#dead aid

[vaga-muffin]

"Paramount was their failure to constrain corruption and bad government."

-Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo

[thepantyreckless]

give a man a fish and he will never learn to fish so he will be dependent on you for fish then you can sell him fish

[rawaninamman]

The United States, says “Jack”, “is not capable of running empires”. Instead, western governments outsource imperialism to people like him in a variety of organisations – Halliburton, G4S, Serco and Capita are the best known of a long list – which make their money from incarceration, the “processing” of asylum seekers or the provision of private “security” in conflict zones.   No longer able to sustain itself by selling dreams, capitalism now thrives on the management of nightmares. Even the provision of disaster relief is transformed into profit.

Antony Loewenstein -  Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe

[ualacs]

Bedside table manners: Edrin's books on Africa

Bedside table manners: Edrin’s books on Africa

I know it’s rude to have a nose through someone’s bedroom, but I couldn’t help notice my friend Edrin Kondi‘s bedside table had 3 interesting books on Africa… And I wasn’t leaving Berlin until I got an explanation about them :) (more…)

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[theredribbonconnect]

4 must-see TED Talks on aid reform in Africa

4 must-see TED Talks on aid reform in Africa

Link: http://africandevjobs.com/devstories/4-must-see-ted-talks-aid-reform-africa/

International development organizations that work in Africa have been criticized for their approaches to developing Africa which disregard the input of the recipients of their projects. These TED Talks from leaders break down why aid reform is needed and how the reforms can benefit Africans as well as shift…

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[threeoceansaway-blog]

Dead Aid. Thoughts

It took me a while to finish this one but I found it really interesting.

Despite the fact of what you may think about an economics book, it is pretty easy to understand. Obviously there are some parts in which you get stuck, but it is not hard to read (en plus, not a long book given the amount of topics it has inside)

I like the fact that it starts with a bit of Aid history, it heps you understand the context and how not all aid is the same.

The ideas are good and, though I would like to read some criticism, I'd classify 'dead Aid' as a must read for every econ student (regardless their ideology) or anyone interested in development.

what i liked the most is that, though being about Africa's development, it helps you understand other developing countries and even the west itself

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/762248245?book_show_action=false 

[mrdmonster]

Today I learned a concept

I wasn't in math or science but in my African Literature class. And amazingly enough, my professor managed to tie in information I'd learned in another class and also here, on Tumblr. 

The concept I learned is that of agency, human agency. 

Our class began with this quote on the screen:

Agency or human agency is the capacity of human beings to affect their own life chances and those of others and to play a role in the formation of the social realities in which they participate. (Dictionary of Anthropology)

He didn't explain it or give any clues as to what we would be speaking about. Instead he had a group of students stand infront and speak for one another even though the students had never met eachother before. Two were 'allowed to speak,' they were mic'd and spoke for their partner as though they knew everything about someone they just met. 

At the end of the exercise Dr. Ramenga asked the 'voiceless' partners how they felt about their partners. There was resentment and anger, the 'voiceless' were perfectly capable of speaking for themselves and yet someone they hardly knew was essentially 'being them.'

His small picture point was this, you shouldn't speak for anyone ever. They can do it themselves, it is not your place to speak on their behalf. The large picture was illustrated immediately afterwards. If we shouldn't speak for other people, does the same apply to other areas such as countries?

This is an African Literature class and I was a little confused in learning about this until Dr. Ramenga challenged us to look up articles and books written about Africa in our library and see who the authors were. For the most part, literature about Africa has been written by 'outsiders.'

It was at this point that this concept of human agency started to make sense to me in my major. Early that morning my Intro to Public History class addressed the drawbacks of presenting to the public, especially small communities. In PH, when addressing someone's 'personal' history can cause anger and if you anger someone, your credentials don't matter. You could have spent 20 years researching this area and the 30 seconds it took you to insult someones memory completely debunked your ability to speak on the topic. 

Essentially, Who are you to say that about us? 

Back to my Lit class, my professor pointed out something about who gets to speak and why. "People are more interested in listening to someone who looks and talks like them."

I challenged that in my own head for only a handful of moments, I knew better than to argue that point. I'm a History major, I've seen this in action in more than one society, in more than one country, in more than one time. It's a reoccurring theme and there are no shortages of examples.

After shattering my view of the world as a human, a student, and a historian I thought he couldn't possibly shock me further. I was wrong.

He began speaking once more of the concept of agency. Dr. Ramenga said these next things right after the other.

1. Societies that don't have agency have no right to speak for themselves. They are underdeveloped in self expression.

2. When someone is deprived of human agency they become less than human.

3. Some people are so used to not having human agency that they come to believe that it is normal.

Some people are so used to not having human agency (the right to speak for themselves, to express themselves, this thing that makes a human) that they come to believe that it is normal.

I understood that, it wasn't hard to grasp or swallow until he brought up examples. Dr. Ramenga is from Kenya and on the first day he said "My name is Ramenga Mtaali Osotsi. That is my name, not my mother's or my father's. I have no first or last name but I have a formal name, Osotsi." 

Why did I share that? Simple. His first example was marriage. In our society it is fairly normal for women to give up their FATHERS name for their HUSBANDS name. Essentially, before you came Mrs. XYZ, you were a child of your father's, your entire identity is based on a name that society chose for you. In a cocktail party setting, you are not your own person, you are Mrs. XYZ, you belong to him.

He solidified the concept of not having this freedom of self expression by telling us about a restricted word for the class. In his class, we are to never use the word TRIBE. Why? 

Tribe: a group of primitive clans under a savage chief. Africa is not made up of tribes. They are nations, peoples, groups, communities; there is more to Africans than what the American media would have us believe.

In order to drive the point further, he brought up Native Americans and specifically the Lakota. Do you know who the Lakota are? They are a people who have been forced to call themselves savages (a tribe) but also Apache. the enemy. These peoples only refer to themselves as a tribe or as the Apache for Americans. They are speaking to Americans on America's level. The Lakota are referring to themselves in ways that Americans are familiar with, in a language we understand.

At that point, I felt like crap about my country. His attempt at making the class 'feel better' was to speak briefly about a conversation he had with a Saudi Arabian graduate student he had. "There is this idea that Africans live in little huts like that is all we are capable of. It's like African's didn't build the pyramids." In fact, his Saudi Arabian student said that Africans didn't build the pyramids, Faronics built them. What is a Faronic, where do they come from if they weren't African?

We- everyone!- makes up new words and nationalities and terms for Africans when they surprise 'us.' I thought surely that wasn't true but then I began thinking of an exercise I did in my Intro to Public History class; coming up with a mental image of 'the average historian.' Sure as spit, there was a trope for that! Do we have a trope of an 'average African?'

Of course we do. We see the emaciated bodies, struggling mothers with dying children, pain and suffering and that's all we know about Africans. 

One of the final things Dr. Ramenga addressed was maps and population of Africa. He broke down the population like this:

1 Billion people total inhabit Africa

take away 600 million (the clinically insane, violent, power-hungry etc)

What's left?

400 million people. There are at least 400 million perfectly sane, loving, brilliant, normal people in Africa.

Why do we ignore these people? "They don't speak to the thinkers, the historians of a land with more history an any other country... this is because they (the thinkers) are the ones that can debunk everything we think we know. But what scholars don't want you to know is that we know nothing. "Why do we assume that things that don't make sense in our world would make sense when these events 'happened?'

Some people are so used to not having human agency that they come to believe that it is normal.

Why are we talking so much about human agency in an African Literature class? The first text we are reading is:

Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

The title is mostly self-explanatory. Moyo is writing to tell America that our Aid, the $3 Trillion gone into Africa from 1998-2003, is only hurting Africans. 

All in all, I have a firm grasp on the concept of human agency. I understand it on multiple plains, I understand the small picture on a personal level, the large picture in a career setting, a historical setting.

Anyways, I just wanted to share that.

[econpenguin-blog]

Dead Aid

"Dead Aid" by Dambisa Moyo 

This book is slightly depressing. Essentially, it argues that development aid to Africa, over a trillion dollars of it, has done nothing to help development in Africa. In fact, she argues that this “aid” is detrimental to growth in Africa.

Aid can drive local firms out of business. Moyo uses the example of an African mosquito-net maker that employs ten people. They churn out nets but there are never enough. So some Hollywood big-shots donate a million dollars worth of nets, doing what they think is a great deed. However, this “great deed” also has the effect of putting the net-maker, along with its ten employees, out of business. 

There is the problem of corruption: not only does aid lead to corruption, it also sustains it. Foreign aid is easily taken for other purposes, and encourages rent-seeking (using power to make money without creating wealth). Moyo also mentions “positive” corruption, where stolen funds are reinvested in the country, as opposed to “negative corruption, where the wealth is taken out of the country. This explains (to an extent), why some Asian countries with high levels of corruption still have such high levels of growth (e.g. China, Indonesia, Thailand).

One point I found very interesting was that “In the early stages of development it matters little to a starving African family whether they can vote or not.” Moyo says that a democracy can actually harm a developing country in these times. It’s harder to get legislation passed with so many people/parties wanting different things, and as a result, the economy might be left without crucial legislation, such as property rights or a functioning legal system. She says that growth is a prerequisite to democracy, not the other way around. 

One of the many solution she suggests is issuing bonds instead of recieving aid payments interesting. Does it really matter where the money comes from? Supposedly, bonds are better than aid because you only get one shot. If you steal the money from a bond issue and buy a private jet, you won’t be able to get any more money. If you use aid money and buy a private jet, you most likely will continue to receive aid. 

Moyo envisions Africa no longer needing aid in the future, calling for it’s gradual reduction over time. She feels that if all the donor countries all told African countries that they would stop receiving aid, they would have more of an incentive to sort things out inside the country (a very free market view). She outlines several things African countries must do to get there: issuing bonds, attracting foreign direct investment, increasing trade, and opening up the financial markets, especially to small to medium sized enterprises.

“Dead Aid” is a very good book about aid to Africa, and presents one view of how to address the problems of aid. It is quite well researched, and Moyo obviously knows her stuff. However, I felt that it was rather brief; it did not go into much detail and I felt like she was skimming over some of the issues a little bit. Furthermore, it doesn't offer alternate solutions to the aid problem, but only to abandon aid altogether. As such, this book is an excellent briefing into the topic, but perhaps not enough for someone who wants to get an in-depth understanding of the problems facing Africa.