The Great Aid Debate: Does Aid Work?

by Yemisrach Kifle · 2010-03-09 06:47:00 UTC
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Every once in a while, someone gets to feel very smart by smugly announcing that international aid doesn't work and it in fact just makes things worse. There is indeed a reason why anti-aid arguments are popular and keep on re-surfacing. There are just way too many examples that illustrate the failure of certain kinds of aid.

That said, to simply declare aid as a whole an ineffective poverty reduction tool runs counter to the facts on the ground. It also ignores the people who have benefited from the hand up international aid has provided. Ask the residents of the small Kenyan village of Sauri, one that's part of Columbia University professor Jeffery Sachs' Millennium Villages project. A recent report by the New York Times recounts the visible difference international aid has made in the lives of the people from this small village.

Besides, what does aid failure really look like? Has aid failed when a child in Ethiopia gets to eat three times a day instead of just once? Has it failed when it enables that child to attend a school that has just been built by an international fund? Is aid failing the little girl who was spared from female genital mutilation because her parents were educated about the risks by an internationally financed program? What would the poorest parts of the world be like if all aid was to be withdrawn today? Do we really think people will just suck it up and start picking themselves up by their own boot-straps when they don't even have boots? It's not likely the free market is going to set up a school or a health post in a far-flung village. Companies do, after all, need to make profits.

Besides, completely snipping international aid -- the only thread millions of people around the world hang on to for their life -- is morally unthinkable. Debating over whether or not 'aid' works is a useless exercise. What would instead be helpful is if more energy was genuinely focused on figuring out what kinds of aid work and why. Not all aid is equal.

Poverty reduction activists need to agitate for more transparency in government agencies that dole out money. They need to campaign against bad aid, the kind set up to benefit the donor country and corrupt local governments and professionals in the field more than the people it is supposed to help. It would also be great if the effect international aid and free-market systems together have on helping poor nations rise from poverty were discussed more.

Let's face it, both aid and trade do the poor good. It is not an either-or situation. Nothing rarely is.

Photo Credit: Meanest Indian

Yemisrach Kifle was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. She currently lives in Dalian, China and works as a freelance writer sometimes covering global poverty.
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