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Minor Truths

Louis Century

“Africa is to development as Mars is to NASA”

By Louis Century - 11 months ago
This is how Dambisa Moyo, author of the hot new development book, Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa, finished a talk at the London School of Economics on Friday.

Billions of dollars are spent on space research, but no one really believes we’ll ever live on Mars. Billions of dollars are spent on development aid, but will we ever no longer need aid? The goal of the aid industry should be to make itself redundant, to no longer exist. Is it?

It’s a controversial subject, to be sure. In a time when unconstrained capitalism is being blamed for our current turmoil, Moyo’s book is a rallying cry for market-based solutions. Reviews from the Guardian and the Independent lambaste the book.

Yet Moyo, the “anti-Bono,” is creating waves with her ideas, and not just in academia. During her talk, she described a recent trip to Africa, where she met personally with Rwandan President Paul Kagame, among other dignitaries.

Moyo grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, studied at Oxford and Harvard, and worked at the World Bank and Goldman Sachs. She is youthful, sharp and realistic. Her criticism of the aid industry – to a roomful of development scholars whose careers depend on it – was as good as it gets. Most importantly, unlike typical academic criticism, Moyo proposes solutions.

I’ll get to her solutions tomorrow. (Quickly, however, I will clarify that her critique does not apply to emergency aid or to charity aid, but only to bilateral government-to-government and multilateral World Bank/IMF-to-government aid – a likely misinterpretation.)

To state the obvious, I’m in London. I am visiting my partner, also Canadian and development-obsessed, who is doing a one-year MSc at LSE. I have to say, taking advantage of the school’s resources has been delightful.

In just a few days, I’ve been to two classes and a talk. The first class was taught by Mary Kaldor, world-class scholar of global governance and columnist at open Democracy. The second class was a panel on the future of humanitarianism including Lakhdar Barhimi (who served as UN Special Representative to Iraq, Afghanistan, South Africa and Haiti, and negotiated the end of the Lebanon civil war), Nicholas Mellor (director of Merlin) and Mary Kaldor, and moderated by development heavyweight Tim Allen. The talk was given by Dambisa Moyo. It’s quite a school, and quite a city, for folks like me (and probably you, too).

In a couple weeks, I return to Canada. For now, expect more London-tinged stories.
 

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