Dead Aid

In our previous post, Ernesto Sirolli made reference to Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid: Why Aid Makes Things Worse and How There Is Another Way for Africa¹. 

Dambisa was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia, in Southern Africa.  She holds degrees from Oxford and Harvard, and has work experience with Goldman Sachs and the World Bank.  Her background, education and work experience came together in Dead Aid to produce a highly-acclaimed book that challenges the way many of us implicitly think about aid in Africa.

In her book, she points out that over the past sixty years, more than $1 trillion in aid has poured into Africa, with little positive impact.  She then goes on to state “Were aid simply innocuous – just not doing what it claimed it would do – this book would not have been written.  The problem is that aid is not benign – it’s malignant.  No longer part of the potential solution, it’s part of the problem – in fact aid is the problem” (Moyo, 2009, pg 47).

For those that are interested in learning more about Dambisa’s point of view and her proposed solutions, you can pick up a copy of the latest edition of Dead Aid on Amazon by clicking here. 

Or if you are more pressed for time, you can check out Dambisa’s 2009 Wall Street Journal article “Why Foreign Aid is Hurting Africa”² by clicking here.

References
1 Moyo, D. (2009). Dead Aid: Why Aid Makes Things Worse and How There Is Another Way for Africa. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

2 Moyo, D. (2009, March 21). Why Foreign Aid is Hurting Africa.  The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com