This is the final episode in a weekly series of posts exploring themes raised in Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid. In Chapter 10 she asks what would happen if the major aid donors decided to inform Africa that in five years’ time the aid taps would be shut off permanently. One feared outcome is that millions of people in Africa would die of hunger, but as Moyo points out, the most vulnerable people do not typically benefit from the money spent on development aid.
Relief aid, such as emergency supplies of food provided to victims of natural or human-created disasters, does help the poorest people when it gets through to them, and community benefit projects such as safe water supplies funded by private aid agencies do benefit the people at the bottom of the social scale. However, according to Moyo, the neediest people usually see no benefit at all from projects funded by development aid, which is where the big money is.
The most likely effect of turning off the aid tap over a relatively short period of time, Moyo says, is that economic life for the majority of Africans would start to improve, corruption would fall, entrepreneurs would rise, and Africans would seize hold of the chance to make better lives for themselves, a chance which is currently denied to them as the result of foreign aid which props up entirely dysfunctional governments.