Excerpts from the Experts
Cultural Difference and Social Change
"I think that African societies need international help to overcome these problems; it is just that the help they need is not predominantly money. Aid is not a very potent instrument for enhancing either security or accountability. Our obsession with it has detracted from the more important ways in which we can promote development: peacekeeping, security guarantees, trade privileges, and governance." --PAUL COLLIER, professor of economics at Oxford University and author of 'The Bottom Billion' (Oxford)
"The problem that Africa is really suffering from is negative PR. If there is a criticism I would level against celebrities—they have tended to perpetuate negative stereotypes. They always tend to portray Africa as a horrendous basket case. They want to portray the war, the poverty, the disease, the corruption. As an African, I'm tired of it." Doesn't a photograph of a celebrity with an impoverished child raise the world's consciousness? Moyo says no. "Taking a picture with a starving African child—that doesn't help me raise an African child to believe she can be an engineer or a doctor." Instead of aid, Moyo recommends other paths to financial and democratic independence: bond issues, trade, foreign investment. "We know what works. We've seen China do it. We've seen India do it." --DAMBISA MOYO, Zambian economist and author of 'Dead Aid'
"Today, the world's poor are the chief victims of structural violence—a violence that has thus far defied the analysis of many who seek to understand the nature and distribution of extreme suffering. Why might this be so? One answer is that the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely to have their suffering noticed, as Chilean theologian Pablo Richard, noting the fall of the Berlin Wall, has warned: "We are aware that another gigantic wall is being constructed in the Third World, to hide the reality of the poor majorities. A wall between the rich and poor is being built, so that poverty does not annoy the powerful and the poor are obliged to die in the silence of history." The task at hand, if this silence is to be broken, is to identify the forces conspiring to promote suffering." --PAUL FARMER, Pathologies of Power
In the past quarter-century, the development economics imposed by rich countries on the poorest countries has been too much like medicine in the 18th century, when doctors used leeches to draw blood from their patients, often killing them in the process. Development economics needs an overhaul in order to be much more like modern medicine, a profession of rigor, insight and practicality. The sources of poverty are multidimensional. So are the solutions. In my view, clean water, productive soils and a functioning health-care system are just as relevant to development as foreign exchange rates. The task of ending extreme poverty is a collective one--for you as well as for me. The end of poverty will require a global network of cooperation among people who have never met and who do not necessarily trust one another." --JEFFREY SACHS, author of 'The End of Poverty'
"Poverty, and the failure of aid to alleviate it, is due to economics, not natural science or the lack thereof. First and foremost, poverty depends on complex economic factors such as the lack of property rights, poor contract enforcement, corruption and extortion by government officials and police, and ineffective government services, all of which block opportunities for poor people to solve their own problems based on their own specialized skills and knowledge. Second, economic incentive problems help explain why aid often goes astray (often, but not all the time, as my book notes some of the same occasional aid successes that Sachs mentions). Large scale plans to deliver the scientific solutions do nothing to fix these incentive problems. Large aid bureaucracies like the UN and World Bank have virtually no accountability for the results of their own programs. Hence, they have incentives to primarily focus on how much money they spend, and to produce numerous reports and world summits." --WILLIAM EASTERLY, author of 'White Man's Burden'
"Events of massive, public suffering defy quantitative analysis. How can one really understand statistics citing the death of six million Jews or graphs of third-world starvation? Do numbers really reveal the agony, the interruption, the questions that these victims put to the meaning and nature of our individual lives and life as a whole?" --REBECCA CHOPP, The Praxis of Suffering
"The problem that Africa is really suffering from is negative PR. If there is a criticism I would level against celebrities—they have tended to perpetuate negative stereotypes. They always tend to portray Africa as a horrendous basket case. They want to portray the war, the poverty, the disease, the corruption. As an African, I'm tired of it." Doesn't a photograph of a celebrity with an impoverished child raise the world's consciousness? Moyo says no. "Taking a picture with a starving African child—that doesn't help me raise an African child to believe she can be an engineer or a doctor." Instead of aid, Moyo recommends other paths to financial and democratic independence: bond issues, trade, foreign investment. "We know what works. We've seen China do it. We've seen India do it." --DAMBISA MOYO, Zambian economist and author of 'Dead Aid'
"Today, the world's poor are the chief victims of structural violence—a violence that has thus far defied the analysis of many who seek to understand the nature and distribution of extreme suffering. Why might this be so? One answer is that the poor are not only more likely to suffer; they are also less likely to have their suffering noticed, as Chilean theologian Pablo Richard, noting the fall of the Berlin Wall, has warned: "We are aware that another gigantic wall is being constructed in the Third World, to hide the reality of the poor majorities. A wall between the rich and poor is being built, so that poverty does not annoy the powerful and the poor are obliged to die in the silence of history." The task at hand, if this silence is to be broken, is to identify the forces conspiring to promote suffering." --PAUL FARMER, Pathologies of Power
In the past quarter-century, the development economics imposed by rich countries on the poorest countries has been too much like medicine in the 18th century, when doctors used leeches to draw blood from their patients, often killing them in the process. Development economics needs an overhaul in order to be much more like modern medicine, a profession of rigor, insight and practicality. The sources of poverty are multidimensional. So are the solutions. In my view, clean water, productive soils and a functioning health-care system are just as relevant to development as foreign exchange rates. The task of ending extreme poverty is a collective one--for you as well as for me. The end of poverty will require a global network of cooperation among people who have never met and who do not necessarily trust one another." --JEFFREY SACHS, author of 'The End of Poverty'
"Poverty, and the failure of aid to alleviate it, is due to economics, not natural science or the lack thereof. First and foremost, poverty depends on complex economic factors such as the lack of property rights, poor contract enforcement, corruption and extortion by government officials and police, and ineffective government services, all of which block opportunities for poor people to solve their own problems based on their own specialized skills and knowledge. Second, economic incentive problems help explain why aid often goes astray (often, but not all the time, as my book notes some of the same occasional aid successes that Sachs mentions). Large scale plans to deliver the scientific solutions do nothing to fix these incentive problems. Large aid bureaucracies like the UN and World Bank have virtually no accountability for the results of their own programs. Hence, they have incentives to primarily focus on how much money they spend, and to produce numerous reports and world summits." --WILLIAM EASTERLY, author of 'White Man's Burden'
"Events of massive, public suffering defy quantitative analysis. How can one really understand statistics citing the death of six million Jews or graphs of third-world starvation? Do numbers really reveal the agony, the interruption, the questions that these victims put to the meaning and nature of our individual lives and life as a whole?" --REBECCA CHOPP, The Praxis of Suffering