Aid allocation. Book reviews. Bottom up. NGOs. 'Development'... MDGs. Africa on the brink of a take off | End Poverty. Financial Crisis, Africa's Permanent Damage, and Aid Effectiveness | A blog about Governance and Development for All. Global Demographics. Die Kriegstreiber von nebenan: Deutschland und der Terror im Kongo - Mittwoch, 04.05.2011. Foreign Aid for a Frugal Age | Miller-McCune. As they prepared to take control of the House of Representatives, congressional Republicans were also getting ready to take on foreign aid — with a scalpel or a meat-ax, depending on how one parsed words.
U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, conservative South Florida Republican and incoming House Foreign Affairs Committee chair, told Agence France-Presse she wants “to cut the U.S. State Department and foreign aid budgets and use U.S. contributions to force reforms in multilateral organizations like the United Nations.” And Foreign Policy magazine suggested that Rep. I’d like to help these two congresswomen succeed in their new jobs by introducing them to Dean Karlan, a professor of economics at Yale University and the president/founder of Innovations for Poverty Action. The first sections of the book are fascinating, if less cheerful than the rest, as they take the shine off a category of aid that has been a darling of the development sector: micro-credit.
Blog | NextBillion.net | Development through Enterprise. More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World - By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. For many in the West, poverty is almost synonymous with hunger. Indeed, the announcement by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in 2009 that more than 1 billion people are suffering from hunger grabbed headlines in a way that any number of World Bank estimates of how many poor people live on less than a dollar a day never did. But is it really true? Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? Our research on this question has taken us to rural villages and teeming urban slums around the world, collecting data and speaking with poor people about what they eat and what else they buy, from Morocco to Kenya, Indonesia to India.
We've also tapped into a wealth of insights from our academic colleagues. But unfortunately, this is not always the world as the experts view it. Jeffrey Sachs, an advisor to the United Nations and director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, is one such expert. This debate cannot be solved in the abstract. Why? Nick Wadhams: Top-Down Aid in Africa. Writing this story for Time about a guy in Florida who wanted to donate a million t-shirts to Africa gave me a great intro into the subject of misguided good intentions and bad aid. It is just so interesting to see how anachronistic people's notions of Africa are _ especially the idea that it needs saving. The big takeaway from the story, as foreign-aid critics repeat endlessly, is that people who want to do good must not come up with some whiz-bang idea based on what they need (or need to get rid of) at home, and what they think Africans might need. And now that I'm looking out for such terribly misguided projects, which are often more about promoting the person behind the idea than doing good for others, they seem to be cropping up everywhere.
Latest example: The founder of Kayak.com, Paul English, wants to provide free wireless internet access to all of Africa. This is such a colossally bad idea. If Paul English wants to help Africa, he should ask Africans what they want.