The current books critical of foreign aid all catalog the failings of that aid. They should instead start with and study the foreign aid successes. The next question is whether those successes, once we understand them better, are replicable. Maybe not, but then we would know. And if they are replicable then we could, um, replicate them.
No one has written the book I am asking for. Are you surprised?
I’m not surprised because in the past 50 years no poor country has developed thanks to foreign aid. You can point to some experiences in which foreign aid has played a minor role but that’s all.
How about De Soto and Sachs?
David Bornstein’s book is pretty much all success stories.
Organizations like Ashoka and other successful projects like those described in C.K. Prahalad’s book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid are not really “foreign aid” success stories. They in fact refute the idea of foreign aid. They deal with ways of achieving success without relying on NGOs and massive give-aways. Foreign aid in its traditional form has never been and never will produce success because it cements oppressive structures in place, enabling dictators like Hastings Banda and Sura Arafat to buy villas on the Riviera and shop at Harrod’s while their people continue to starve in the dark.
Organizations like Ashoka and other successful projects like those described in C.K. Prahalad’s book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid are not really “foreign aid” success stories. They in fact refute the idea of foreign aid. They deal with ways of achieving success without relying on NGOs and massive give-aways.
No, the ideas aren’t traditional, but I don’t see any reason not to consider them a successful form of foreign aid–the money (even though the amounts aren’t huge) and some of the organizational expertise are coming from an NGO (Ashoka is an NGO). The model is different–it depends directly on the ambition and expertise of local social entrepreneurs, but that is why it is a successful model of foreign aid.
See also Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away the Ladder: Policies and Institutions for Economic Development in Historical Perspective.
On Amazon.com Charles Kindleberger is quoted as saying that “it demands attention†.
Tyler -
Very good point. In fact, there are successes that we can identify, but it has proven maddeningly difficult to re-direct the foreign aid engine toward them.
Some colleagues and I had some modest success on this front in my 14 years at the World Bank through the Development Marketplace and related mechanisms. But the momentum of the current aid system – and its ability to take credit for aberrant successes without making fundamental changes – should not be underestimated. Hence the value of the current crop of books.
Jim Wolfensohn has established a new Center at Brookings, led by Johannes Linn, to study the successes and how we can scale them up.
At GlobalGiving, we have created an eBay-like marketplace where the goal is to help the “cream” (high-impact approaches) rise to the top and get more funding. We are far from achieving the full vision, but we are making progress.
Dennis Whittle
http://www.denniswhittle.blogspot.com
http://www.globalgiving.com
Ruth Levine at the Center for Global Development tackled a sub-topic of that issue in Millions Saved: Proven Successes in Global Health.
David Dollar at the World Bank did a lot on this. Here is an economist article on his work. The bottom line was that aid to countries who are already persuing good policies (macroeconomic stability, low inflation, low corruption, spending on education and health rather than military, etc), the return was good. Giving to countries with bad policies at best had no effect and at worst encouraged more of the bad policies.
http://tqe.quaker.org/wealth-and-poverty/ explains why sending aid in advance of development is a complete waste of money.
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