Controversial New York University economics professor William Easterly has published an article in the Los Angeles Times arguing that the media and the international development establishment have been portraying Africa as a more backward basket case than it really is. He says that cellphone and Internet usage has doubled every year for the last seven years, and foreign private capital inflows to Africa exceeded foreign aid in 2006.
According to Easterly, foreign aid won’t be what helps Africans to escape from poverty. They will be escaping “the same way everyone else did – through the efforts of resourceful entrepreneurs, democratic reformers and ordinary citizens at home.” At the TED Conference in Africa in June, Ugandan journalist Andrew Mwenda said, “What man or nation has ever become rich by holding out a begging bowl?” Bono, who was in the audience, and who is a strong supporter of foreign aid, shouted out his disagreement.
As a result of my own experiences with foreign aid on the ground in Africa, I tend to agree more with the position taken by Mwenda and Easterly than with that of Bono. Mwenda’s argument that 30 years of Western aid to Africa has achieved nothing seems to be supported by the statistics, although to be fair to Bono, he advocates intelligent use of foreign aid, rather than repeating the mistakes of the past.