Apr 06, 2009

Moratorium on Moyo Mumbling

by Laura Starita

There is nothing like a pointless debate to get esteemed figures to retrench into their default fighting positions. The current response to Dambisa Moyo’s recently published book, Dead Aid, is the newest spark to ignite the (seemingly) eternal flame of whether foreign aid hurts or helps Africa, and it seems like much ado about…well…not much we haven’t heard before.

A Zambian native educated at Harvard and Oxford, Moyo spent years working in the City of London before turning her economically-trained attention to the question of aid in her home continent. The sum of her arguments is that aid props up problematic governments and keeps those governments accountable to the IMF or World Bank instead of to their own people; it prevents economic growth; and does nothing to help the poor. In short, no one would miss it. As such, Western donors should call their recipients and tell them they are cutting off the flow of non-humanitarian and disaster funds in five years, and can, as a result watch a flourishing Africa develop out of bond issues and business venture funding.

The response has been equivocal: The Wall Street Journal likes it, the Economist doesn’t; William Easterly supports her position (or at least supports her right to have it, and sees its value), the ONE campaign doesn’t. Plenty of other outlets and pundits have weighed in.

The roots of Moyo’s criticism are not much different from what others have said before her, whether Western (Easterly, Collier, Robert Calderisi) or African (James Shikwati), and with much less scholarly rigor, credible analysis and writerly flair than most of them at that. All those who are expending significant energy to discredit her mostly derivative ideas seem to have lost touch—as they fine-tune the language of their point-counterpoint—with an inexorable reality: there is zero chance that Western governments will cut off aid flows to Africa within five years. Not even one Western government is going to do that, despite the fact that we wallow in (relative) economic dark days. More importantly for PA readers, the significant humanitarian funding that gets sent by private charity is nowhere addressed in the circular debate.

So given that more money is without doubt heading to the African continent, it would be more useful to talk less about whether it should go and more identifying fields where those funds could be less vulnerable to the kind of siphoning or—more problematically, irrelevance—that plagues the aid and philanthropy sectors. A few areas come to mind, based on recent events. For example, agriculture has taken a hit in some countries due to a caterpillar rampage in Liberia, stem rust in Kenya and delayed rains in the same. Incomes will be impacted significantly, as will food security. The World Bank and the Gates Foundation have both signaled their interest in putting funds and resources toward agriculture. Could aid from other sources contribute to productive investment in agricultural research, given drops in agricultural investment over the past two decades? Would help in the form of cash-for-work or in-kind food sourced from local/regional stocks help get affected communities through the crisis while forestalling some of the productivity losses that happen with in-kind food aid sourced from the West? And what about crop insurance, a product mostly unfamiliar to both African farmers and the banks that service them, to protect income for farmers? Or work to decrease the canceling effect of incoherent policies, such as food aid donations and US farmer subsidies, the latter of which depresses prices and makes the former more necessary. On other subjects, we wrote recently about a study that showed that giving insecticide-treated bed nets for free through pre-natal clinics in Kenya increased use of the nets and could push communities over the fifty percent thresh-hold needed to provide benefit to all those in the region. Are there malarial regions that have been under-served? In a piece notable mostly for the extent to which it over-stated the potential of technology, Jeffrey Sachs referenced a positive effort to provide medical training to local people as one element in an initiative to prop up failing village health systems. Is there a productive way to support such efforts? Answering these questions and hundreds more like them could help do more with aid.