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Dead Aid: Dead Simple A Review of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dam bisa Moyo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009)
Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa, by Dambisa Moyo, reads like a revolutionary manifesto against a capitalist system responsible for exploiting the masses. Replace "capitalist" with "aid" and you deduce the core of Moyo's argument - aid has failed to deliver sustainable economic growth and poverty reduction for most countries in Africa. In fact, according to Moyo, it has done the opposite. By propping up corrupt elites, deemphasizing transparency, and hindering viable markets from forming, aid has only compounded Africa's troubles. To emancipate Africans from the cycles of foreign dependence and poverty, Moyo suggests cutting aid to Africa once and for all. And this is exactly where Moyo's argument fails; there is no perfect solution that can be implemented in a ten -year time frame, as she suggests, that would allow African countries to solve their economical and political dilemmas. Ironically, reducing all the factors at play in Africa to the single problem of foreign aid is a radical oversimplification that traps Moyo in the same kind of single-mindedness that characterizes the proponents of aid whom she battles so fervently in her book.
It is illuminating to take a step back and situate Dead Aid in the larger debate about financial assistance. Over the past few decades, a grand narrative and a celebrity- dominated culture of aid has pervaded development discourse as musicians turned activists like Bono and Bob Geldof have rallied Westerners to provide financial assistance to make the poor better off. In The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs (2005) explains how Americans give too little - 18 cents for every $100 in national income - and that for foreign aid to have an impact there should be a lot more of it (Sachs 2005).
In the past, few people questioned the effectiveness of aid or the ethical dilemmas involved in "doing good." However, during the past ten years, Western economists and politicians have published a series of powerful critiques against aid. With The White Man's Burden, William Easterly (2006) became...