“Aid has been, and continues to be, an unmitigated, political, economic, and humanitarian disaster for most parts of the developing world,” writes Dambisa Moyo in her book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa. The following analysis of successful cases of economic growth in the continent and empirical studies in the field is helpful in evaluating the merits of that argument. The most cynical among them claim that aid is actually inhibiting growth by creating an environment of aid dependency they advocate for a complete withdrawal. Researchers attempt to explain this lack of correlation between aid and growth through different theories. The top 10 individual recipient countries are in Africa (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development).

International aid reached a new peak of $152.8 billion in 2019, yet still fell short of the UN target of 0.7% of Gross National Income (Parker). This lack of growth persists today, even as Africa receives higher levels of aid each year. Poverty has been decreasing rapidly in all regions of the world with the exception of Africa, where only about 45% of countries in sub-Saharan Africa achieved the MDG goal of eradicating extreme poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa, however, there was only a 28% decrease, from 57% to 41% (United Nations). The global poverty rate was 47% in 2000 it decreased to 14% in 2015 (Roser and Ortiz-Ospina). Goal 1 of the MDGs was to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty between 19. In 2000, eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were set forth by the United Nations to meet the needs of the world’s poorest by 2015. There is a place for both foreign aid and successful economic development. While aid could be more effective, to deem it harmful is unfair to both donors and recipients and maintains this conceptualization of hopelessness regarding development on the continent. Between the years 20, aid-dependency has actually “decreased by one third in the world’s poorest countries, exemplified by Ghana and Mozambique where aid dependency decreased from 47% to 27% and 74% to 58% respectively” (Stanford). Navy’s Project Handclasp, Spain 2014Īccess the magazine spread of this issue here.Ībstract: Throughout this paper, I push back against some of Dambisa Moyo’s arguments in Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa regarding the effectiveness of aid by laying out empirically based strategies that will allow for foreign aid to promote successful economic development. Featured image: Civil Service mariners unload aid bound to Africa under the U.S.

Dambisa moyo foreign aid