Ending Aid to Africa -- the Anti-Bono

The current issue of Guernica Magazine has an interview with economist Dambiso Moyo. Harvard and Oxford trained and an alumnus of both the World Bank and Goldman Sachs, she has written and argued tirelessly that aid, particularly government-to-government aid, which has amounted to more than a trillion dollars in the post-colonial period, has done more harm than good.

In Dead Aid: Why Aid is not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa (2009) she argues that aid has underwritten corruption, rendered governments unaccountable to citizens and most important painted Africa and Africans as hopelessly poor, diseased, corrupt and hence worthy of pity rather than respect.

Her prescriptions centre on solutions that empower, including easing remitances, financing social services through taxation rather than aid, accessing bond markets and perhaps most important, championing small scale entrepreneurs through micro-financing.

Not surprisingly, she has little time or patience for celebrity aid proponents such as Bob Geldoff and Bono, who, she insists, simply don't understand African realities or economics. While she sees a legitimate role of limited charitable projects or emergency aid, she argues that within a reasonable time the dominant forms of intergovernment aid should simply be ended. Here is a clip of Moyo participating in a debate on African aid: