Blood and Milk

Bad development projects are worse than no help at all. A bad project can break a local economy, create a culture of dependency, and damage a community until community members cannot even imagine attempting to solve their own problems. This is what the do no harm approach is all about. This the lesson you should learn from James Shikwati. He lumps all aid together, true, the good and the bad, but he’s right about how dangerous bad aid can be.

Those of us involved in international aid should take our role seriously. When your project takes criticism, you shut up and listen. You act like any other professional, and you examine the criticism to see if it is accurate.

Here’s what you don’t do. You don’t say, ever “Why would you be so mean when we are just trying to help?” If you find yourself about to say that, it means you have failed. Pack up your souvenirs and go home.

Lesson: There is no free pass for good intentions.

A timely and relevant post.

A Kenyan economist opposes foreign aid in Spiegel. James Shikwati is interviewed in Spiegel, and is firmly opposed to aid for Africa. He argues that it causes corruption, creates huge bureaucracies, and teaches Africans to be beggars.

On one hand, he makes some accurate points. Badly designed aid packages will indeed create a culture of dependency. It’s not just likely but certain that there will be some private sector leakage because of corruption, and foreign governments and NGOs do put distorting pressures on the English-speaking labor market. And he might be right that without food aid, African countries would develop trade relationships to compensate for shortages.

He’s also got some great quotes here:

“Currently, Africa is like a child that immediately cries for its babysitter when something goes wrong.”

“Unfortunately, the Europeans’ devastating urge to do good can no longer be countered with reason.”

However, I think his overall conclusion is weak and off-base. He blames the used-clothes markets in Africa on charity donations of old clothes, when in actuality they are generally bought by the pound in the US from thrift store and resold to African wholesalers. This is a pretty elementary mistake for an economist to make, and it implies he has an axe to grind and won’t let the facts get in his way. He also seems to think that aid goes directly to governments, when most goes through international NGOs with extensive networks of locally-hired staff. He also downplays the impact of HIV to an unreasonable degree.

It’s an article well worth reading for its contrarian view, but it’s not likely to change your perspective on the world.

James Shikwati

Doing good and doing harm

“For God’s sake, please stop the aid!”