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LESSON 6: NEW FORCES
Introduction
In this lesson we will look at opportunities and challenges to
development. We will gain a different
understanding and perspective of this topic based on experts’
views. The assigned readings will provide
further explanation and you will come to understand how
different their views on development are.
New Forces in Development
How do bad leaders, corruption, bad institutions and policies,
and even rich nations exacerbate problems through
high barriers to trade? What are possible solutions? Some
solutions might include forgiving debt (but we should
recognize that this is not the complete solution), as well as
removing barriers to global integration, encouraging
local regional trade, eliminating tariffs and quotas for highly
indebted nations, and fostering economic freedom
/reforms. The Global Policy Forum website summarizes many of
these factors, and posts articles that focus on many
important issues in development, as summarized in the image
below. Please click on the link in the Reading and
Resources folder to access the Global Policy Forum website

section on Poverty and Development in Africa in
preparation for our discussion this week.
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In making our assessment of economics and the international
system, we must also recognize the impact of
culture on economic performance. Culture includes the
peculiarities of local history, social structure,
psychology, religion, norms, and politics. While the apostles of
globalization contend that market forces
overwhelm everything else, others such as Paul Krugman and
Jeffrey Sachs powerfully counter-argue that
geography is itself a limit to globalization. Just think of what it
means to be a landlocked country, and how
much extra it costs to bring goods to ports for trade in an open,
competitive system. Add to these
complications of physical geography other factors such as
climate, tropical location, local traditions, and the
picture becomes complicated quickly. If we include the
dynamics of culture and geography, we begin to
understand why traditional macro-economic measures may have
less of an impact than many previously
assumed they would in the international system.

What are the effects of economic globalization on poor
countries? Since the backlash demonstrations
against globalization at the ministerial meetings in Seattle and
Genoa in the late 1990s, this question has
entered public debate. Neither globalization nor protests,
however, are new. Indeed, throughout the history
of development economics, attention to the implications of
international integration has been of prime
interest, especially regarding whether foreign trade and
investment reduce or increase inequality. Now
international financial “crises” and issues of global economic
governance also pervade the debate.
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Culture, Globalization, and Development
‹ ›
The Role of Foreign Aid
Dr. Moyo, in her own words, has called aid to Africa a
"disaster" (Moyo, n.d.). In an interview with Forbes
magazine, Dr. Moyo discussed how she envisions the aid
industry changing in the years ahead. She states,
"Fundamentally, an aid model hurts incentives and discourages
people from doing the right thing. And that is
clearly what has happened across Africa. Am I sanguine that the
model is somehow going to change? No, because
there are so many vested interests in keeping things as they are
today" (Pereira 2011).
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1 2
The advanced industrial states, including Europe and the United
States, are facing difficult choices about
how much aid to allocate in light of increasingly pressing
domestic issues. Dr. Moyo believes that as
governments prioritize domestic issues, such as education,
pension reform, infrastructure, etc., that few
resources will be left to allocate to development. As a result,
African governments will have to look for other
means of development assistance beyond aid.
At the same time, however, Dr. Moyo has publicly stated that
she remains optimistic that change will eventually
take hold. Her reasons for optimism center on two primary
factors:
These arguments can be put into greater perspective by
examining where most foreign aid is currently allocated.
When we look at data from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD), we see that
only one-quarter of all official development assistance goes to
the world's poorest countries (see charts below).
The biggest share goes to low-middle income countries, not the
world's poorest states, as one might assume.

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Knowledge Check
Question 1
When we look at data from the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development
(OECD), how much of all official development assistance goes
to the world's poorest
countries?
1
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Conclusion
In conclusion, we begin this section with less theory and more
conjecture than we have used in previous
weeks. We will discuss Dr. Moyo's position, along with the
positions of Dr. Jeffrey Sachs and Dr. William
Easterly, in the forum this week. The reading will shed light on
how divergent their views on development
are. Whose argument do you find the most persuasive and why?

Does each economist adequately account
for the complexities in the process of development? Do they
adequately account for country-specific factors
that might vary across Africa? These are some questions to ask
yourselves as you complete the reading this
week on the development debate.
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References
Moyo, Dambisa. N.D. “Aid Ironies: A Response to Jeffrey
Sachs.” The World Post.
Pereira, Eva. 2011. “Dambisa Moyo: An Economist with a
Vision.” Forbes, April 19.
Image Citations
"Chart that shows Average Portion of ODA Received between
1970-2012" by Globalissues.org.
"Chart that shows Share of ODA Aid Over Time" by
Globalissues.org.

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1/7/2019 Aid Ironies: A Response to Jeffrey Sachs | HuffPost
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dambisa-moyo/aid-ironies-a-
response-to_b_207772.html 1/4
T H E B L O G 06/26/2009 05:12 am ET | Updated May 25,
2011
Aid Ironies: A Response to Jeffrey Sachs
By Dambisa Moyo
Ahead of the publication of my book Dead Aid, an author friend
of mine cautioned me about responding to opponents
who found it necessary to color their criticism with personal
attacks. This, he argued, is a tried and tested way of side-
stepping the issues and providing a smoke screen when faced
with a valid argument.
Jeffrey Sachs’s latest posting is just the latest example of using
this tactic to obfuscate the facts and avoid addressing
the fundamental issues regarding aid’s manifest failure to
deliver on its promise of generating growth and alleviating
poverty in Africa.

And though I am responding here in order to refute his
arguments, as a fellow economist, I intend to rely on logic and
evidence to make my argument and show Mr. Sachs the
professional courtesy that he has failed to show to me.
Development is not that hard. We now have over 300 years of
evidence of what works (and what doesn’t) in
increasing growth, alleviating poverty and suffering. For
example, we know that countries that finance development
and create jobs through trade and encouraging foreign (and
domestic) investment thrive.
We also know that there is no country — anywhere in the world
— that has meaningfully reduced poverty and spurred
significant and sustainable levels of economic growth by
relying on aid. If anything, history has shown us that by
encouraging corruption, creating dependency, fueling inflation,
creating debt burdens and disenfranchising Africans
(to name a few), an aid-based strategy hurts more that it helps.
It is true that interventions such as the Marshall plan in Europe
and the Green Revolution in India played vital roles in
economic (re)construction. However, the key and (often
ignored) difference between such aid interventions and those
plaguing Africa today is that the former were short, sharp and
finite, whereas the latter are open-ended commitments
with no end in sight. The problem with an open-ended system

is, of course, that African governments have no
incentive to look for other, better, ways of financing their
development.
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Mr Sachs knows this; how do I know? He taught me while I was
studying at Harvard, during which he propounded the
view that the path to long-term development would only be
achieved through private sector involvement and free
market solutions.
Perhaps what I had not gleaned at that time was that Mr. Sachs’
development approach was made for countries such
as Russia, Poland and Bolivia, whereas the aid- dependency
approach, with no accompanying job creation, was
reserved for Africa.
Mr. Sachs chooses to ignore that relying on aid at a time when
the United States is facing 10 percent unemployment
rate and Germany (another leading donor) could contract by as

much as 6 percent, is a fool hardy strategy. The aid
interventions that Mr. Sachs lauds as evidence of success are
merely band aid solutions that do nothing to lift Africa
out of the mire — leaving the continent alive but half drowning,
still unable to climb out on its own.
Yes an aid-funded scholarship will send a girl to school, but we
ought not to delude ourselves that such largesse will
make her country grow at the requisite growth rates to
meaningfully put a dent in poverty. No surprise, then, that
Africa is on the whole worse off today than it was 40 years ago.
For example in the 1970’s less that 10 percent of
Africa’s population lived in dire poverty — today over 70
percent of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than US$2 a day.
There is a more fundamental point — what kind of African
society are we building when virtually all public goods —
education, healthcare, infrastructure and even security — are
paid for by Western taxpayers? Under the all
encompassing aid system too many places in Africa continue to
flounder under inept, corrupt and despotic regimes,
who spend their time courting and catering to the demands of
the army of aid organizations.
Like everywhere else, Africans have the political leadership that
we have paid for. Thanks to aid, a distressing number
of African leaders care little about what their citizens want or

need — after all it’s the reverse of the Boston tea-party —
no representation without taxation.
In conclusion let me respond to four of Mr. Sachs’ specific
points:
1) Regarding Rwanda: It is absolutely true that Rwanda depends
on substantial amounts of foreign aid. The point is
that President Paul Kagame is working tirelessly to wean his
county off of aid dependency (which is precisely the
approach to exiting aid that I have been arguing for). To focus
on the point that Rwanda relies on aid is to miss the
more interesting point: Here in a country where over 70 percent
of the government budget is aid supported, the
leadership is pushing for less, not more aid — what is it Mr.
Sachs that President Kagame sees that you do not see?
Let’s face it, the leadership could guilt-trip us all into giving it
even more aid after the international community turned
its back on the country at its time of need during the 1994
genocide, yet it does not.
2) Mr. Sachs claims that I, alongside the compassionate Bill
Easterly, lump all kinds of [aid] programs in one
undifferentiated mass. I would point Mr. Sachs to page 7 of my
book which explicitly makes a delineation between
different types of aid.

3) Regarding the “countless” examples in which countries have
benefited from aid then graduated: Here I would
point Mr. Sachs to page 37 of my book to a discussion of these
countries; The difference again with these success
stories is that they did not rely on aid to the degree and length
that African countries do today. Moreover, they very
quickly adopted the market-based, job-creating strategies
outlined in my book, for which Mr. Sachs seems to have an
apparent aversion, in favour of the status quo.
4) Finally, with respect to Mr. Sachs’ remark that I would see
nothing wrong with denying US$10 in aid to an African
child for an anti-malarial bed net — even labeling me as cruel; I

say, if working towards a sustainable solution where
Africans can make their own anti-malaria bed-nets (thereby
creating jobs for Africans and a real chance for continents
economic prospects) rather than encouraging all and sundry to
dump malaria nets across the continent (which
incidentally, put Africans out of business), then I am guilty as
charged. Don’t forget that the over 60 percent of Africans
that are under the age of 24 need jobs not sympathy.
As a final plea, I urge Mr. Sachs to heed the words of his
former boss, Mr. Kofi Annan when he says “The determination
of Africans, and genuine partnership between Africa and the
rest of the world, is the basis for growth and
development.”
Dambisa Moyo is the author of Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not
Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa (Farrar
Straus & Giroux); www.dambisamoyo.com
Dambisa Moyo
Author, ‘Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is
a Better Way for Africa’
M O R E :
Dead Aid Jeffrey Sachs Aid To Africa Dambisa Moyo Africa

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1/7/2019 Aid Ironies | HuffPost
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-sachs/aid-
ironies_b_207181.html 1/6
2011
Aid Ironies
By Jeffrey Sachs
The debate about foreign aid has become farcical. The big
opponents of aid today are
Dambisa Moyo, an African-born economist who reportedly
received scholarships so that she
could go to Harvard and Oxford but sees nothing wrong with
denying $10 in aid to an
African child for an anti-malaria bed net. Her colleague in
opposing aid, Bill Easterly,
received large-scale government support from the National
Science Foundation for his own
graduate training.
I certainly don’t begrudge any of them the help that they got.
Far from it. I believe in this kind
of help. And I’d find Moyo’s views cruel and mistaken even she

did not get the scholarships
that have been reported (Easterly mentioned his receipt of NSF
support in the same book in
which he denounces aid). I begrudge them trying to pull up the
ladder for those still left
behind. Before peddling their simplistic concoction of free
markets and self-help, they and
we should think about the realities of life, in which all of us
need help at some time or other
and in countless ways, and even more importantly we should
think about the life-and-death
consequences for impoverished people who are denied that help.
Nine million children die each year of extreme poverty and
disease conditions which are
almost all preventable or treatable or both. Impoverished
countries, with impoverished
governments, can’t solve these problems on their own. Yet with
help they can. The Global
Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, and the Global Alliance
on Vaccines and Immunizations
are both saving lives by the millions, and at remarkably low
cost. Goldman Sachs, Ms.
Moyo’s former employer, gives out more in annual bonuses to
its workers than the entire rich

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world gives to the Global Fund each year to help save the lives
of poor children. And when
Goldman Sachs got into financial trouble it got bailed-out by
the US Government. Rich
people have an uncanny ability to oppose aid for everybody but
themselves.
Recently Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, wrote an op-ed for
the Financial Times praising
Moyo’s fresh thinking. This is extraordinary. His government

has depended on aid for more
than a decade. Nearly half the budget revenues currently come
from aid. Rwanda currently
imports around $800 million of merchandise each year, but only
earns $250 million or so in
exports. So how does it do it? Aid, of course, helped to pay for
around $450 million of the
imports. Without foreign aid, Rwanda’s pathbreaking public
health successes and strong
current economic growth would collapse. Kagame’s op-ed did
not help FT readers to
understand this.
Americans are predisposed to like the anti-aid message. They
believe that the poor have
only themselves (or perhaps their governments) to blame. They
overestimate the actual aid
from the US by around thirty times, so they imagine that vast
sums are flowing to Africa that
are then squandered. Many believe, typically in private, that by
saving African children we
would be creating a population explosion, so better to let the
kids die now rather than grow
up hungry. (I’m asked about this constantly, usually in
whispers, after lectures). They don’t

understand the most basic point of worldwide experience: when
children survive rather than
die in large numbers, households choose to have many fewer
children, in fact more than
compensating for the decline in child mortality. Africa’s high
child mortality is ironically a core
reason why Africa’s population is continuing to soar rather than
stabilize as in other parts of
the world.
Of course, most Americans know little about the many crucially
successful aid efforts,
because Moyo, Easterly, and others lump all kinds of programs -
the good and the bad - into
one big undifferentiated mass, rather than helping people to
understand what is working
and how it can be expanded, and what is not working, and
should therefore be cut back.
Nor do Americans hear that many poor countries graduate from
the need for aid over time,
precisely because aid programs help to spur economic growth
and successfully prepare
countries to tackle future priorities. US aid to India for
increased food production in the

1960s paved the way for India’s growth takeoff afterwards.
There are countless other
examples in which countries have benefited from aid and then
graduated, including Korea,
Malaysia, Taiwan, Israel, and others. Egypt is on that path
today, and Rwanda, Tanzania,
Ghana, and others will be as well if both donors and recipients
carry forward with a sensible
assistance strategies.
Here are some of the most effective kinds of aid efforts: support
for peasant farmers to help
them grow more food, childhood vaccines, malaria control with
bed nets and medicines, de-
worming, mid-day school meals, training and salaries for

community health workers, all-
weather roads, electricity supplies, safe drinking water, treadle
pumps for small-scale
irrigation, directly observed therapy for tuberculosis,
antiretroviral medicines for AIDS
sufferers, clean low-cost cook stoves to prevent respiratory
disease of young children.
Shipment of food from the US is a kind of aid that should be cut
back, with more attention on
growing local food in Africa.
Out of every $100 of US national income, our government
currently provides the grand sum
of 5 cents in aid to all of Africa. Out of that same $100, we
have found around $10 for the
stimulus package and bank bailouts and another $5 for the
military. It is not wonderful that
what has caught the public’s eye are proposals to cut today’s 5
cents to 4 or 3 cents or
perhaps zero.
Follow Jeffrey Sachs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JeffDSachs
Director, Center for Sustainable Development and Sustainable
Development

Solution
s Network
M O R E :
Malaria Foreign Aid Wealth Dambisa Moyo Africa
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Virtue and Prosperity
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
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2011

Back to Sachs: Astrology, Despotism, and Africa
By William Easterly
Sachs Debate, Day Eight. Surprised that Sachs did not
understand the point about Occam”s Razor — that a theory
should be as simple as possible but no simpler. African poverty
is complex, but our theories about it should not have
so many complex Buts, Ors, and Excepts that they are
impossible to disprove. Ignoring Occam’s Razor is how
astrologists stay in business. An astrologer might say: “Watch
out for strangers, especially those that are short, or dark,
or fat.” You are likely to have a number of bad encounters with
strangers (especially in New York!), and being short or
dark or fat covers such a large share of the population that you
will likely encounter one such bad stranger sooner or
later.
Explaining poverty with a flexible theory of geography when

you already know the outcome is similarly easy. First, you
notice that Africa had the worst poverty in the world. Second,
you notice that Africa also was the only region that had
a particular mosquito species, had a lot of landlocked countries,
had a particular soil type, had a large share of
continent in the tropics, and did not have snowmelt-irrigated
agriculture. Third, you define the worst geography as
consisting of exactly these mosquitoes, landlocked locations,
soil types, tropical locations, and non-snowmelt-irrigated
fields. Fourth, presto, you have proven that the worst geography
causes the worst poverty!
(Some of the above are bad, but there are many bad things in
the world, and only such a four-step exercise
guarantees that you will predict rightly in hindsight. Try this at
home to impress your friends! If they object that you are
just using hindsight, tell them they don’t understand “complex
systems.”)

The more general argument why geography is not destiny is
what economists call comparative advantage — you can
export what your geography gives you an advantage at, and
import what you geography makes you bad at. Rainy
countries (Thailand) could export rice (a thirsty crop) and
import minerals, and desert countries could export their
minerals (Chad) or maybe tourism (Dubai), and import rice.
Landlocked countries can always export high value to
weight items by air (Swiss watches, Botswana’s diamonds).
Other geographic problems have their own human
adaptations. Sachs contradicts his own geographic determinism
by arguing how easy it would be to solve these
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problems (like bed nets and medicines for malaria). When such

adaptation to a geographic problem fails, there is
usually some kind of social barrier to problem-solving.
One such social barrier is a bad government — like a
government that fails to deliver the bed nets and malaria
medicines — a factor that Sachs still refuses to do justice.
Sachs’ admission that Zimbabwe has a bad government is
not exactly revolutionary. This continues his longtime
reluctance to admit there is bad government in any except a
handful of extreme despots. In his UN Millennium Project in
2005, he only named four bad governments: Belarus,
Myanmar, North Korea, and Zimbabwe. At the time, he listed 63
poor countries that are “potentially well governed” (a
phrase equivalent to calling Paris Hilton “potentially a virgin.”)
Sachs’ list included 5 out of the 7 countries singled out
by Transparency International at the time as the most corrupt in
the world, and fifteen governments that Freedom

House classifies as “not free.” Even a despot like the late
Saparmurat Niyazov of Turkmenistan, who so terrorized his
country that he renamed the months of the year after himself
and his mother, couldn’t get into Sachs’ bad government
club at the time. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia is inexplicably a
Sachs darling despite rigging elections, jailing opposition
politicians, shooting demonstrators, fielding an army accused of
atrocities in the Ogaden, and fomenting corrupt
practices that give Ethiopia a ranking on Transparency
International of 138th out of 179 countries.
So Sachs’ re-admission that Zimbabwe has a bad government
does not get us very far. Unlike Sachs’ flexible theory of
bad geography, the bad government theory is inflexible enough
that it is not rigged to pass in advance — but it does
pass this test according to studies by three different and
independent groups of economists published in prominent
economics journals. All science is essentially about testing one

thing — like bad government — at a time, but nobody
thinks that such testing implies only one thing matters.
The bottom line remains the same — bad government is a
serious obstacle to development, and ignoring bad
government is a formula for the same kind of bad aid policy that
gave us decades of failure. Isn’t it time for a change?
Even cash transfers directly to poor people are demonstrably
better than cash transfers to poor governments.
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Professor of Economics, New York University, author “White
Man’s Burden”
M O R E :
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2011
Geography Lessons: Correcting Sachs on
African Economic Development
By William Easterly

Professor Jeffrey Sachs continues the debate on aid to Africa
originally prompted by
Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid. As usual, I will of course let
Dr. Moyo defend herself
against specific criticisms made by Sachs and his co-author
John McArthur. But Sachs
unveils such a strange geographic theory of Africa’s poverty,
with strong implications for aid
policy, that I am forced to respond.
It’s nice to move back to doing what professors are supposed to
do — examine other
professors’ ideas on their own merits, not attack their persons.
Sachs is an inspirational and
hard-working intellectual, just one whose ideas on Africa
happen to be sometimes totally
wrong, and other times only seriously wrong.

A good rule for all theories, including theories of global
poverty, is Occam’s Razor — make
the theory as simple as possible, but no simpler. Another way to
put it is beware of
explanations with too many Ifs, Buts and Excepts in them.
Sachs’ geographic theory of
Africa’s poverty has gotten few takers among other economists,
perhaps because it fails
Occam’s Razor. Sachs starts off by saying that being in the
tropics is bad for development
(he gave a very terse summary here, I am drawing from his
articles to articulate more fully his
geographic story). Isn’t rapidly growing India also in the
tropics? Yes, but they have
snowmelt-fed irrigation instead of rain-fed agriculture. Isn’t
rich Singapore also in the tropics?

Yes, but they are coastal instead of landlocked. Don’t Latin
America and Asia also have
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tropical diseases like malaria, just like Africa? Yes, but they
have a better kind of mosquito.
So a region will be poor if they are tropical, if rainfed, if
landlocked, and if they have the
wrong mosquitoes — which, yes, fits many African countries.
The reason for Occam’s Razor
is that with enough Ifs, Buts, and Excepts you can fit any theory
to any set of facts. If I am a
balding, grey-bearded, bespectacled, white male economic
development professor residing

in Greenwich Village, I will write a post on Occam’s Razor —
yes, that theory also fits the
facts.
The consensus among most academic economists is that
destructive governments rather
than destructive geography explains the poverty of nations.
Robert Mugabe was a lot worse
for Zimbabwe than Anopheles mosquito. Corruption is more
fatal for oil-rich Nigeria and
Angola than latitude. Health is determined more by public
actions against disease than by
species of parasite. Other factors that Sachs mentions such as
illiteracy and poor
infrastructure are also symptoms of bad government services.
Geography may have had
some influence on history, but through institutions — good

government spread along lines of
migration and communication through most temperate regions
more easily than it did to
tropical regions. The latter were also victims of colonialism
(and in Africa’s case, the slave
trade as well, which goes some way to explain bad government
in Africa today).
Of course, it is a lot easier to justify giving a lot of aid to
African governments if they are
helpless victims of geography rather than (mostly) just being —
bad governments. Is this why
Sachs offers a bizarre geographic theory of Africa’s poverty and
is oblivious to the bad
governments that many courageous African dissenters have
fought at great sacrifice? I don’t
have enough evidence to test any one theory of Sachs, but I
know it makes for bad aid

policy. Make sure that aid reaches poor people, which usually
means it should not go to
poor governments.
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Professor of Economics, New York University, author “White
Man’s Burden”
M O R E :
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T H E B L O G
Moyo’s Confused Attack on Aid for Africa
By Jeffrey Sachs and John W. McArthur
05/27/2009 04:16 pm ET | Updated May 25, 2011
Ms. Dambisa Moyo’s recent Huffington Post article exposes the
confusions that underlie her slashing attacks on aid.
Most importantly, she seems to believe that sub-Saharan Africa
was economically prosperous and then was pushed

into poverty by aid. She makes the following statement: “No
surprise, then, that Africa is on the whole worse off today
than it was 40 years ago. For example in the 1970’s less than 10
percent of Africa’s population lived in dire poverty —
today over 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than
US$2 a day.”
Let’s parse that statement for a moment. World Bank
researchers Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion prepare the
benchmark under-$2-a-day historical headcount data going back
to 1981. According to their figures, headcount
poverty under $2 a day was 74 percent of the population in sub-
Saharan Africa in 1981 and 73 percent in 2005. Other
prominent estimates that go back to 1950 or 1970 also
contradict Moyo’s statement, by showing high and persistent
poverty. All of the macroeconomic time series by Maddison,
Summers and Heston, and others tell the same story: the

majority of Africa’s population started out impoverished at the
time of national independence in the 1960s and 1970s,
and a majority remains impoverished till today.
If we move beyond the GNP and income measures, the enormity
of Africa’s long-term poverty challenges become
even more apparent. As we have documented elsewhere,
Africa’s literacy, agricultural productivity and urbanization
rates were very low in 1970. Rural poverty was pervasive.
Africa’s road coverage, electrification, rail network, and other
infrastructure were sparse at best and typically non-existent in
rural areas. Aid did not kill Africa.
Despite the persistence of poverty, many conditions in Africa
have in fact improved in recent decades. Child mortality
has declined from 229 per 1,000 births in 1970 to 146 per 1,000
births in 2007. Adult literacy has increased from
around 27 percent in 1970 to around 62 percent in 2007.
Primary school net enrolments have increased from around

53 percent in 1991 to around 70 percent in 2007. Aid has played
a helpful role in this. Yet aid was very limited,
averaging around $35 per African per year since 1960. Aid has
never been properly resourced or targeted for a
focused period to end the poverty trap and thereby to break the
dependency on aid.
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Africa’s differences with other regions lie not in aid, but in
circumstances and history. Unlike South Asia, for example,
Africa has not yet had a Green Revolution of higher food yields,
the formative event of India’s economic takeoff from
the late 1960s. India is a civilization of great river systems and
large-scale irrigation, thanks to the Himalayan snowmelt
and glacier melt and the annual monsoon rains. Africa is a
continent of rain-fed (non-irrigation) agriculture. The original
Green Revolution, in which India’s food output per land area
rose markedly, came in the irrigated systems of Asia, not
the rain-fed systems of Africa.
US aid heavily subsidized India’s Green Revolution while
World Bank opposition to aid for African agriculture from the
1980s until recently played an opposite and adverse role,
holding back a similar breakthrough for Africa. It was the

absence of aid for African agriculture rather than its presence
that cost Africa mightily. And one can go on. Africa’s
tropical disease burden, heavy concentration of landlocked
countries, decline of aid for infrastructure during the 1980s
and 1990s, and misguided attempts by Africa’s creditors to
collect debt servicing under “structural adjustment
programs” during the 1980s and 1990s all played their part.
Moyo now campaigns against the kinds of aid that can keep
millions of African children from dying or being maimed
for a lifetime through the consequences of serious episodes of
disease. She advocates cutting the aid that has
allowed more than 2 million Africans access to life-saving
AIDS treatment, since governments are involved. Almost
unimaginably, she opposes the distribution of anti-malaria bed
nets for Africa’s hundreds of millions of young people
on the alleged grounds that it has put bed net producers in

Africa out of business. In her own words:
“Finally, with respect to Mr. Sachs’ remark that I would see
nothing wrong with denying US$10 in aid to an African child
for an anti-malarial bed net — even labeling me as cruel; I say,
if working towards a sustainable solution where
Africans can make their own anti-malaria bed-nets (thereby
creating jobs for Africans and a real chance for continents
economic prospects) rather than encouraging all and sundry to
dump malaria nets across the continent (which
incidentally, put Africans out of business), then I am guilty as
charged. Don’t forget that the over 60 percent of Africans
that are under the age of 24 need jobs not sympathy.”
The confusion underlying this remark is staggering. There are
hundreds of millions of Africans at risk of a killer
disease, around two hundred million cases of the disease, and
around 1 million preventable deaths per year, yet Moyo

is opposed to urgent help if nets are not produced in Africa. She
seems both unmoved by the massive suffering and
unaware that Africa has gone from producing exactly zero long-
lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs) a few years ago to
several million per year now, with thousands of jobs in the local
industry, as a result of the demand for nets created by
aid for malaria control.
She takes no note of the fact that global aid for malaria control
is also training tens of thousands and soon hundred of
thousands of rural Africans as community health workers; and
seems to be unaware that unchecked malaria has long
devastated Africa’s economy while malaria control is finally
emptying the hospitals, putting mothers and fathers back
to work and children back to school, and contributing to the
boost in Africa’s productivity and economic growth of
recent years. She says that if her position against aid for LLINs
is deemed to be cruel, then yes, she is “guilty as

charged.”
Moyo is not offering a reasoned or evidence-based position on
aid. Everybody that deals with aid wants to promote
financial transparency and market-led growth, not aid
dependency. We and others have recommended many
successful mechanisms to limit corruption and ensure that aid
reaches the recipients, as is happening in the disease-
control programs. The purpose of aid should indeed be to break
the poverty trap through targeted investments in an
African Green Revolution; disease control; children’s
education; core infrastructure of roads, power, safe drinking
om/jeffrey-sachs/moyos-confused-attack-on_b_208222.html
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water and sanitation, and broadband; and business development,
including microfinance and rural diversification
among impoverished smallholder farmers.
Moyo wants to cut aid off dramatically, even if that leaves
millions to die. African leaders - like President Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf of Liberia, Dr. Awa Coll-Seck of Roll Back Malaria, and
Ministers Charity Ngilu and Beth Mugo of Kenya - have
fought for Africa’s poor and have used aid to save lives and
help economies to prosper. These leaders disagree

fundamentally and urgently with Moyo’s attacks. They
recommend more aid, fully accountable and properly targeted,
to meet urgent needs.
Since the record shows that Africa has long been struggling
with rural poverty, tropical diseases, illiteracy, and lack of
infrastructure, the right solution is to help address these critical
needs through transparent and targeted public and
private investments. This includes both more aid and more
market financing. That combination will indeed ensure that
private markets and African entrepreneurship can succeed.
Follow Jeffrey Sachs on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JeffDSachs
Follow John W. McArthur on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/mcarthur
Director, Center for Sustainable Development and Sustainable
Development

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