Our colleagues at the John Templeton Foundation recently held a fantastic forum at New York University on the many hidden pitfalls of well-intentioned aid efforts in Africa. It featured William Easterly, author of The White Man’s Burden: How the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, and Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.
Here’s one of several clips of their conversation that has been posted on Youtube:
Ms. Moyo raises some interesting and provocative points on everything from the G20 summit, to Bono, to the idea of empowering individuals rather than governments. It all gets to one big, fundamental question: how can we close the so-called poverty gap in developing countries (not just in Africa, but around the world)?
Here at the Press, we’ve got a fantastic book coming out later this month that addresses this very question, so this is something that we’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. Our book, In the River They Swim: Essays from around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty gathers contributions from a fascinatingly diverse group of individuals working on the front lines of the global fight against poverty. Many of Ms. Moyo’s ideas — particularly her emphasis on the private sector as a positive force for change in eradicating poverty — would be right at home in its pages.
It is certainly heartening to see that there are several books rolling off the presses this season that echo this same important point (see also Jacqueline Novogratz’s The Blue Sweater). Hopefully this concurrence signifies some kind of broader zeitgeist that will ultimately lead to positive change.
