Big on ideas, short on analysis
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After reading Jeffrey Sach's book The End of Poverty (his main argument calling for more aid to Africa), I felt that I should read a book arguing for the opposite, so I picked up Dead Aid.
The central argument is that aid is bad for Africa, and in fact, is the reason that Africa is caught in a poverty trap. It's an interesting argument, and one that I was ready to be convinced of, but I felt that Moyo didn't provide enough analysis and evidence for her claims. Too many times I found myself asking the questions: how? and why? While I am inclined to agree with her central claim, her argument in the specifics was too simplistic and she often presented the link between aid and Africa's plight as causal, when really it seem corollary.
The book is too short and the analysis too brief to hold up to the mighty claim that she proposes. Clocking in at only 153 pages, the book dedicates 19 pages to a brief history of aid (which is really well done), another 19 pages to show that aid isn't working, and 21 pages to prove that aid actually kills growth. While I'm not a fan of bloated writing for no reason, Moyo needed more evidence, more explanation to back up her arguments.
Even though I found the beginning part of the book frustrating at times, I was looking forward to her ideas on how to develop Africa without the help of aid (which the next 80 pages or so are dedicated towards). She has some interesting ideas around capital markets, foreign direct investment, and micro-lending, but again I found her arguments to be overly simplistic and too brief to be convincing. She discusses how trade should be a big factor in the growth of Africa, something that's obviously true. Then she documents how subsidies in Western nations effectively push out African products by flooding the market with cheap, subsidized goods. But then she doesn't really propose how to solve this issue of unfair trade.
In the end, I was convinced that Africa needed to be weaned off aid, but remained unconvinced that it was as simple as Moyo claimed and that the alternatives were as easy to implement as she laid out.
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Read this book before you send your money
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With all the hype about deadbeat western governments not living up to their committment to African aid, this book stops the shame-game dead in its tracks. Written by someone who has grown up and lived in Africa, not just visted in a chartered jet, this book looks at the way so much of our foreign aid is at best misdirected and at worst completely squandered. The author argues that simply propping up hand-out programs and feeding corrupt regimes does little to improve the long term survival of this highly dysfunctional continent. Instead she offers a more logical structured approach to fixing the problem through empowerment, and goes on to offer hope in what so many see as a hopeless situation. The money still needs to be forthcoming, just not in the way it is being currently applied. This book tells us how to do it right.
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