Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa

by Dambisa Moyo (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $4.17

  There is no doubt: we want to help. The well-documented horrors of extreme poverty around the world have created a moral imperative that people have responded to in their millions. Yet the poverty persists. At a time of unprecedented global prosperity, children are starving to death. Are we not being generous enough? Or is the problem somehow insoluble, an inevitable outcome of historical circumstance? In this provocative and compelling book, Dambisa Moyo argues that the most important challenge we face today is to destroy the myth that Aid actually works. In the modern globalized economy, simply handing out more money, however well intentioned, will not help the poorest nations achieve sustainable long-term growth. Dead Aid analyses the history of economic development over the last fifty years and shows how Aid crowds out financial and social capital and feeds corruption; the countries that have 'caught up' did so despite rather than because of Aid. There is, however, an alternative. Extreme poverty is not inevitable. Dambisa Moyo shows how, with improved access to capital and markets and with the right policies, even the poorest nations can prosper. If we really do want to help, we have to do more than just appease our consciences, hoping for the best, expecting the worst. We need first to understand the problem.

• New

  paperback
  

  $12.30

  Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid reveals why millions are actually poorer because of aid, unable to escape corruption and reduced, in the West's eyes, to a childlike state of beggary. We all want to help. Over the past fifty years $1 trillion of development aid has flowed from Western governments to Africa, with rock stars and actors campaigning for more. But this has not helped Africa. It has ruined it. Dead Aid shows us another way. Using hard evidence to illustrate her case, Moyo shows how, with access to capital and with the right policies, even the poorest nations can turn themselves around. First we must destroy the myth that aid works - and make charity history. 'Articulate, self-confident and angry ...this book marks a turning point' Spectator 'A damning assessment of the failures of sixty years of western development' Financial Times 'Kicks over the traditional piety that Western aid benefits the third world' Sunday Herald Books of the Year 'Dambisa Moyo makes a compelling case for a new approach' Kofi Annan 'This reader was left wanting a lot more Moyo, a lot less Bono' Niall Ferguson Dambisa Moyo worked at Goldman Sachs for eight years, having previously worked for the World Bank as a consultant. Moyo completed a PhD in Economics at Oxford University, and holds a Masters from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. Her other books include Winner Take All and How the West was Lost. She was born and raised in Lusaka, Zambia.