Dead Aid

In an article relating to the U.S. plan to assist the people of Afghanistan, it says

“Afghanistan's president Tuesday praised U.S. plans to provide more civilian
help to his country, and expressed hope that the country becomes less dependent
on international partners in coming years.”

I would like to highlight the president’s use of the words ‘less dependent’, because as I have mentioned before, the result of dependency is a key argument against international aid programs. However, if distributed in the right way, aid can be used effectively, encouraging the development of a self-sufficient country instead of a country dependent upon aid and unable to dig themselves out of a hole that they did not create.

For example, there are hundreds of microfinance institutions, which help people all over the world help themselves. Instead of just handing the poor world objects needed to survive, microfinance institutions or ‘the poor man’s bank’ hand them the tools to build their own future. They do this by giving out loans and grants of small sums of money to impoverished people to enable them to start a business and create lives for themselves. Microfinance helps to create a sustainable future, instead of one shredded by dependency.

In fact most aid organizations are mending their methods of aid, aiming on giving self-sufficiency, instead of hand outs. For example, USAID, an independent federal government aid distribution agency, provide women in Afghanistan with the tools to earn a living through 86 bakeries, employing a growing total of 896 poor women. Additionally USAID has worked on sustainability projects in Afghanistan such as constructing 2,700 kilometers of roads so that 60% of Afghanis now live approximately 50 kilometers of the newly constructed ring road. USAID are also working on increasing the amount of Afghanis that have electricity, as currently it stands at a mere 15%.

In this very recent CNN video, Dambisa Moyo, the author of ‘Dead Aid’, a book that calls for a change in aid strategy, says we are living in an “aid dependent world.” She argues that there is absolutely no evidence to suggest the aid creates jobs for Africans.

However, we can see from the work done by USAID and microfinance institutions, that if aid is used in the right way, it can definitely create jobs. Dambisa Moyo says that the right way to go about getting rid of aid is introducing an increasingly free market. She says she would like aid to decrease in hopes of creating more sustainable countries that don’t have to depend on aid. If only it were that easy.