Book Review: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo

Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux)

The debate about the goals, nature, and effectiveness of aid to the developing world has raged for decades. In recent years, these debates have focused upon aid to Africa as donors struggle to determine why their efforts haven’t made greater gains on the continent. Dambisa Moyo has injected a new idea that has turned the debate upside-down. In Dead Aid, she asserts that aid has not only been ineffective, but has ultimately slowed development through the creation of crippling dependencies and the empowerment of corrupt regimes. After chronicling the history of development aid to the continent and illuminating the problems she sees in the system, Moyo provides an outline for a new paradigm of development. This approach depends on standard and creative market tools that could renew the relationship among the diverse nations on the continent, and their relations with the developed world. Her model relies on market and democratic forces to ensure efficiency and transparency in the process of growing economies and developing social infrastructure.

The concept of eliminating or drastically reducing foreign aid in the form of loans and grants has often been received (and dismissed) as an ultra-conservative effort to abandon the world’s poor. Dead Aid, however, is receiving impressive attention in policy circles as both an indictment of the current world order and a road map for a more effective development process. While her argument shares many fundamental assumptions about the goals of development with mainstream economists like Jeffrey Sachs and William Easterly (e.g. economic growth equals climbing the rungs of the ladder of development), her text directly challenges their approaches. Battles among economic development policy makers may seem like a contest for the chiefdom of nerdville, but this one is pretty heated, and it might just change the world.

Robin Pendoley
Curriculum Director
Thinking Beyond Borders

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