open Democracy News Analysis - money & work - Comments

Chola Mukanga on "Killing aid"

Chola Mukanga — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:18:10 +0000

With respect to the scope of aid under consideration, Dead Aid pretty much defines it as set out in the review. If Dr Moyo has departed from that position since the book was written then it is to be applauded. But to some extent that is irrelevant because we must take the book as given. Not every villager reading her book will have access to You Tube videos offering some of her reversals.

Although everyone would agree that some aid has flaws, and I make this clear in the review, there’s no evidence presented that aid causes poverty, as Dr Moyo argues. The assertion has no empirical basis.

I think there are many areas of aid which are ineffective and equally some which are useful. Infrastructure aid like the current NorthSouth Project http://www.zambian-economist.com/2009/04/north-south-project-14bn.html which is being funded by a group of donors in association withCOMESA countries to the tune of $1.4bn is welcomed by many. Another example might be aid to improveland titling as currently being implemented by DFID in Rwanda. The examples of positive are plenty.

I should also make it clear that my being a "fan" of micro finance, is probably best viewed within context. I simply note that aid to improve access to credit as taken forward by IFAD and targeted at Zambian farmers is good. In fact in the review, I specifically note that there’s no evidence that microfinance generates significant macro economic impacts, the test by which we should judge interventions, according to the Moyothesis.

In short, we are probably not too far apart. I think the key difference is what where you emphasise the problems involved, I see positive alternatives that if properly prioritised would make substantial difference to the lives of many of our poorest people.

JFox on "Killing aid"

JFox — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:01:40 +0000

It's unlikely that Moyo or anyone else would argue against humanitarian or emergency aid to assist victims of catastrophe. The assistance we are talking about here is Development Aid - the kind that is intended to promote a long-term improvement in the welfare and standard of living of the poor in recipient countries.
Having studied a significant number of individual government-to-government aid programs, I have yet to find one that was clearly successful. Those I have looked at over a long career have been, at best, poor value for money and largely ineffectual, and at worst - and most commonly - they were counter-productive.They tended to create or strengthen aid dependency, foment corruption (often of a kind so subtle as to be virtually invisible to casual observers), and all-too-often to come with strings attached that made them more beneficial to donor-country suppliers than to recipients.
In theory, measures can be taken to address such issues; in practice, however, the measures are either not implemented, or readily circumvented.

Government-to-government aid is, almost by definition, "top down". The intended beneficiaries - who are invariably acutely conscious of their condition and have a pretty good idea of how to improve matters - are seldom, if ever, seriously consulted. Nor are they given authority over the expenditures supposedly made on their behalf. Others do that - local bureaucrats or politicians, aid "professionals", foreign consultants etc. who, apparently, "know better". A vast international conglomerate of experts, corporations, officials and planners (all based either in the First World or in privileged Third World enclaves) have their hands in the till. For examples - and a startlingly vivid first-hand account of poverty and the ineffectiveness of conventional aid - I recommend P.Sainath's Everybody Loves a Good Drought.

Micro Finance - of which Mukanga among many others is a fan - has certainly proved to be an effective form of developmental assistance. But it is not - at least in the brilliant format devised by Muhammad Yunus - in any sense conventional aid and it is about as far from government-to-government aid as it is possible to be. Above all it does precisely what most official assistance fails to do, namely to leave development in the hands of those who both need it and know how to use it.

Jeff Mowatt on "Surgut without its gilding of “black” gold. Some anti-myths about the “oil Eldorado""

Jeff Mowatt — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:36:32 +0000

Well, that's certainly a mixed picture. It's been nearly a decade since I visited Siberia, Novokuznetsk in my case. Then it was true, that miners made most money and spent it, because the economic crash had left most wary of banks, when the rouble devalued by 1000 times. In those days, not so long ago people were sometimes paid in electrical goods, or fertiliser.

Young people would tell me then that Russians have no rights, they meant economic rights as I now understand. There were single mothers a plenty, and they needed state help because bribing a notary to declare unpaid alimony was all to coomon.

Just after, before I knew him, my colleague now, had been in Tomsk, to leverage an economic development project called the Tomsk Regional Initiative and Microfinance Bank. An unqualified success for the morel colatteral style of microfinance and 10,000 small enterprises as a result.

He saw a few things, a dark skinned man beaten to death in the streets for being just that. he tried to intevene but it was too late. Later someone wanted a relative to gain an important postion in one of the Universities, police were procured to round up female students and threaten repeated rape unless they were willing to bear false witness against the incubent jobholder.

You'll hear little about Tomsk because, for one it worked as a bottom up approach where Harvard and trickle-down had failed, and an incoming Putin allowed it replicated but later local FSB didn't get what they wanted. He was blacklisted for Russian visa renewal.

There was a website for this initiative in Tomsk, but it's now in web archives and all text obliterated. Here's what's left of the story.

http://www.p-ced.com/projects/russia/

Next stop was Crimea but that's another story.