3 ms·
It doesn't have to be either-or. There is room to support entrepreneurship programs and direct cash aid to the poorest and antimalarial nets and civil society p
by aaronharnly 11y ago
It doesn't have to be either-or. There is room to support entrepreneurship programs and direct cash aid to the poorest and antimalarial nets and civil society programs. The one lesson the past century of international development efforts should have taught us is that there is no single silver bullet. A complex web of measures, not all of them spectacularly successful, may not fit in a blog post or a TED talk, but neither does the world and its complexities.
- SixSigma 11y agoThe west has given $23T in aid since the 1970s. The bullet isn't even made from water, let alone silver. One reason, according to William Easterly in his book "The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good" it is because the aid tries to meet the goals of the givers, not the recipients. This kind of scheme is more of the solution Easterly proposes, just give people money and see what they come up with, rather than creating schemes that attempt to implement a solution dreamed up in a nice office or by Bob Geldof shouting "do something" [1] http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=638 http://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?a=63...
- knowaveragejoe 11y agoWhile it's not perfect(hasn't reached the "perpetual utopia" the author describes as the goal), to suggest that all of the foreign aid going into Africa and other developing regions has done "little good" is simply ignorant.