Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (original 2009; edition 2010)

"To be honest, I could've done with a different organization scheme"
read more: http://likeiamfeasting.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/dead-aid-dambisa-moyo.html ( )

I recently found myself describing this book as "the literary equivalent of tasing Bono." More or less apt, although actually tasing Bono would be more fun.

Anyway: okay, I'm more or less convinced. Moyo makes a convincing case that aid is not helping in Africa. It fosters corruption, with billions of unsupervised dollars up for grabs, and it destroys local economies, keeping Africa in a state of helplessness. Moyo loses me a bit on the solutions end; when she talks about the international bond market, I...well, I don't really know what that means and she doesn't explain it well enough. (Your results may vary if you're not as dumb as me.) The general idea is that instead of waiting for handouts, Africa should join the global economy; Moyo points out that plenty of developing countries, including a few in Africa, have done that with much better results than relying on aid.

I wish she'd included a few case studies about specific countries in Africa, maybe some that have failed and some that have succeeded (at least a little)using different methods. Instead she refers repeatedly to a fictional country; why not be real? The book's only 150 pages long, it's not like she didn't have room.

But still: overall, she's made her case well.

Will it change anything? I doubt it. There's a lot of political work to make a change as radical as turning aid off, and there's Bono on the other side. China is way ahead of us here, and I think the most likely story is that Africa ends up pulling itself up with their help more than ours, with the result that Africa ends up more Chinese than Western at the end of the process. Which is...fine? I guess? ( )

This book may have good ideas but the exposition is so clumsy as to weaken the arguments. Coupled with frequent confusion regarding correlation and causation (the author really should take a refresher on basic statistics) in the first four chapters, the points put forward really just aren't convincing. As a previous reviewer stated, this felt like a paper that Moyo tried to stretch into a book. It doesn't work. It may be worth following some of Dead Aid's suggestions, but this book does not make the case for them adequately. ( )

Does anyone really need to be convinced that monetary aid doesn't work, and particularly doesn't work for Africa? Apparently so, because Western politicians and Western celebrities continue to send money to despots and stage ridiculous "benefit" concerts and drives to wring even more out of taxpayers. Why do they do this? I suppose they have to assuage their misplaced guilt somehow, and it's much easier to throw money at a broken system than to do the work to figure out how to make it functional. I can't know their motives, really. Maybe they honestly don't see what's right in front of them and the rest of the world: aid hasn't helped Africa. On the contrary, Moyo argues that it has severely damaged the economies and cultures and governments of those African countries that have relied upon it (some for 97% of their income).

The United States has given a trillion dollars to Africa over the past few decades, and what is there to show for it? Widespread corruption, poverty, and disease, and shrinking economies. And Moyo argues that aid is not neutral -- it hasn't simply failed to fix these problems. It has caused them. Free money rewards despots and encourages armed conflict. It discourages initiative, industry, and entrepreneurial spirit. It harms those few individuals who are working hard to better their lot -- Moyo gives the example of the African mosquito-net maker who is put out of business by the arrival of 100,000 donated nets from foreign do-gooders who purchased them from non-African manufacturers.

So, what's Moyo's better way for Africa? Free markets. Trade. Foreign Direct Investment. Micro-loans. In short, business. It's not personal guilt-driven "philanthropy" that will help Africa, in the short term or the long run. It's healthy, not-excessively-regulated business. It's already been proven that these methods work, see India and China or South Africa for examples.

I don't think Moyo's argument is perfect here, and not everything in this book is convincing. It's not terribly well-edited or well-documented, and it's not too accessible for the non-economist layman. (She does say that it's written for economists and policy-makers, not necessarily the casual reader.) But I think, generally, she's right and says things that absolutely must be said and heard. ( )

Maybe she has a good point, most likely in fact, but the argument for it sucks. This book gets more than one star only for the cute anecdotes about foregin investment in Africa. The rest is blah blah nothing. Maybe the author tried to make a paper book length and failed embarassingly...