Else Where: Does Aid Work?

Great article Yemi.

Yemi,

Great article! I like the way you summed it all up...

"Let's face it, both aid and trade do the poor good. It is not an either-or situation. Nothing rarely is."

Thank you Hen (hey you are still around:) and Addis for taking your time to read:)

Helina, yes, as Mamitu mentioned - you are talking about "Dead Aid". Moyo Makes compelling arguments. Mamitu, I agree - food aid especially - when done wrong can have horrible effects. Most countries are untying their aid (meaning when food aid is needed, it is bought from the recipient country or the region instead of the home countries of the aid giving institutions but USAID is still particularly bad about this).

We need more effective aid - more good aid - aid as bridge to self sufficiency. The end goal should always be to help the recipients claw their way out of the intractable poverty in which most our people live. I get upset when people just declare "Aid doesn't work!" as a whole and then nothing when there is really no alternative. The debate should be more focused on how aid should be used to be most effective.

This discussion is great! If you guys have more to add, lets take it to the change.org website where the article is. At the bottom there is room for comments. I am sure the larger audience there is interested in reading the comments too:)

I support Fair trade in stead of food aid. Food aid creates dependency. It doesn't solve the problem of hunger and poverty. It rather perpetuates it. Furthermore, food aid has made foreign NGOs de facto governments in many poor countries.Instead of bible caring European priest, Africa is today in the hands of subsidized wheat caring NGOs.

What Africa needs is fair trade. Europe and America must stop subsidizing their farmers. Allow poor countries free access to western market. That will address most of the problem in Africa. And if they want to help the needy, then send cash instead of subsidized wheat. There is plenty of grain in Africa. It is just that many poor people in the continent cannot afford to buy it.

Belaya, we could do both. It doesn't have to be either or.

Janhoy, I agree -- trade is a very important part of the equation but, in the mean time, food aid or other types of aid are necessary evils. We are not going to turn a hungry mother with an infant away and tell her to sell something when she has absolutely nothing.

So hence, we need to talk about aid and making it more effective because we are not going to stop aid any time soon. That is why campaigns to untie all aid are really important.

"Europe and America must stop subsidizing their farmers. Allow poor countries free access to western market." YES YES YES to all this Janhoy!

But we are not there yet ... We still need to have multiple avenues in attacking poverty. We need to build capacities of our villages and towns. We need to educate the young and keep them healthy. We need to create an atmosphere in which entrepreneurship thrives. We need to get people to the point where they are growing surplus on their lands.

All this takes money. Most poor countries don't have the money to build these types of programs on their own. Again, here - aid comes in and we want it to be the kind Mamitu mentioned earlier "temporary, goal oriented and effective".

So my point is... while all these other thoughts about how to make things better are great and should be pursued, in the mean time, we need to make aid effective because it is one tool we will have to continue using until we reach a tipping point where it is not necessary. And we are not at that tipping point.