3451 Why aid for economic development fails

and often hurts the very people it tries to help. In the late 1970s I had a wonderful 3.5 year contract as a bibliographer/reference librarian in agricultural economics. More specifically, I was paid by the U.S. Department of State, Agency for International Development, through a grant won by Ohio State University's College of Agriculture, Department of Economics who wanted a librarian to help develop a collection of research about how local, home-grown small grants for credit, not gifts, to people with little or nothing lifted families and villages out of poverty and hunger. To correct a problem created by an earlier group of well-intentioned social scientists in the 1950s-60s post-colonial era, these grants also went to women and to small collectives in rural areas. Perhaps it was credit to buy several sewing machines, or looms, small tools, or a working well for a village which could then sell the water. Savings and investments are concepts totally foreign to many cultures and I don't know the success rate of these programs over the long run. Really, compared to the amounts you think of as "aid," these grants were very small, but they were not Utopian or from the top-down. The aid went to the entrepreneurial and those with a network of family or friends who would use their services. And don't forget those of us along the way who were paying our mortgages, tuition and Lazarus' bills with these grants--we benefited too. It paved my career path for two more contracts, and then a 17 year faculty position in the Veterinary Medicine Library.

Western interference in the economies, politics and cultures of third world developing countries has not turned out well. The American left loves to point fingers at Christian missionaries who started hospitals, schools, churches and developed a written language for Africans, Asians, and Islanders, but their footprints are tiny compared to the disaster of foreign aid from Europe and the U.S. The missionaries at least were accountable to God and their denomination; the governments and the U.N. agencies who soaked the guilt-swamped for more money funded various interventions in their societies which were accountable to no one, not even us taxpayers, elevating a class of dictators, bureaucrats and home grown thieves.

For all the statistics and scholarly stuff, check The White Man's Burden; why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good, by William Easterly (Penguin Press, 2006) and The Trouble with Africa; why foreign aid isn't working, by Robert Calderisi (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Both authors were officials with the World Bank (one for 16 years, the other for 30) and have seen this problem from the inside out. And just to balance out your public library's collection, you might recommend either or both titles, after you've done your own research. [UAPL owns 2 copies of the Easterly title.]

Some reviewers found Easterly's writing style "cynical and breezy" choosing to criticize how he said it--even his chapter headings--rather than what he said. This is a tried and true method to keep people from reading or buying a book. One review of the Calderisi book starts out by comparing the number of people who died in the WTC with the number of Africans who die of AIDS, and how much the EU spends helping its own farmers. This is also a diversionary tactic to not deal with the book in hand. Build a straw book and burn it. Easterly and Calderisi clearly show that aid has not produced the desired results; Africans are now being victimized by their own rather than Europeans. The naysayers will want to kill the messenger and want to do business as usual either from guilt or because they are in the money pipeline.