It isn’t often that you read an African’s economist’s opinion on aid for Africa. It’s quite an eye-opener.
It’s obvious Western aid is - at least sometimes - useless when you actually go to Africa.
I just asked my husband (a Nigerian) - he agrees it is useless. He said when Western governments give money to African governments, the gov’t officials just steal it. The same goes for medical aid: he said America often donates medicines to Nigeria, but gov’t officials and doctors steal it and sell it, keeping the money for themselves.
He suggests, if you want to help, to donate money to local organizations and churches if you want poor people to actually get some benefit. He said if you just send money, the rich people will share the money. Actually building a well in a poor town, for example, is better. Bypassing the national government, and targeting local area governments (a village, for example) is the best way to help. An individual who is actually there can help; money from big aid organizations and governments usually gets wasted or stolen.
By the way, he is the son of a chief, and if you send him some money, he will make sure it goes to people who need it. (Just kidding.)
It’s pretty obvious really. Unearned money always has bad side effects, especially when (as everyone seems to know except the politicians in donor countries) the immediate recipients steal it all.
However, I’ve noticed even “real” aid projects rarely have any lasting impact - well-drilling, for example - because nobody owns the kit, nobody knows how it works, and nobody can be bothered to fix it when it breaks (or perhaps can’t afford to, or can’t obtain the parts).
Bababa, I’m curious about you/your husband’s opinion on trade in low-income countries. Surely, poor people do have money. They’d be dead if they didn’t. And assuming they’re able to work, they perhaps have other non-financial means of conducting business transactions (if no money changes hands, then your local corrupt offical/policeman can’t siphon any off). If, hypothetically speaking, there were businesses selling or leasing the trappings of ‘civilisation’ at a very low price point, do you think that might be more productive than giving stuff away? I’m talking about things like water and sanitation systems, power, transport, communications. People would have to pay for them (as opposed to waiting until hell freezes over for the gubmint to provide a half-assed version with what’s left of the aid money) but they’d be cheap, they’d work, and the government wouldn’t have any involvement. Any thoughts?
Reason I ask is that I’m involved with a company designing such things.
[quote=“finley”]Bababa, I’m curious about you/your husband’s opinion on trade in low-income countries. [/quote]My hubby is next to me now and I am asking him questions about this as I type. For one thing, I think one misperception is that giving aid money to poor countries makes the people dependent on aid - they don’t do anything for themselves because they are waiting for a handout; the original article claimed it sapped their entrepreneurial spirit. From what I have seen, this is not true. The money isn’t getting to the poor people at all, so has no effect on how hard they are willing to work. Nigeria has the most trade-based economy I have ever seen. Pretty well no one has a job; everyone is a trader, or wants to be. There are government jobs, which require a bribe to get. They pay poorly, but they make up that in bribes.
[quote](if no money changes hands, then your local corrupt offical/policeman can’t siphon any off). [/quote]There are basically no jobs in Nigeria. People may want to work, but resort to trading because there is almost nothing else. Farming, yes, but then the farmers sell their goods at market.
This is how a poor person gets the money necessary to start trading or start a small business (a hair salon, store, restaurant, etc.): the parents don’t have enough money to support a child, or are just looking to secure his/her future, so the child goes to work for a richer family. These houseboys and housegirls can be as young as three years old; this is usually if it is a relative’s child. If it is a stranger’s child, they start from the age of 15 to 18. They work without pay for 7 years or more, just getting a place to stay and food; the ‘owner’ will pay for the child’s school fees; with the older ones, the expectation is that the ‘owner’ is training the child. At the end of this service, the expectation is that the ‘owner’ will provide some money for the person to set himself or herself up in business, maybe 2,000 dollars (US) if it was a boy being trained, maybe 200 dollars for a housegirl, which would be enough to start up a small shop.
[quote] If, hypothetically speaking, there were businesses selling or leasing the trappings of ‘civilisation’ at a very low price point, do you think that might be more productive than giving stuff away? I’m talking about things like water and sanitation systems, power, transport, communications. People would have to pay for them (as opposed to waiting until hell freezes over for the gubmint to provide a half-assed version with what’s left of the aid money) but they’d be cheap, they’d work, and the government wouldn’t have any involvement. [/quote]This is already the way it works in Nigeria. The government cannot provide electricity (NEPA - the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority, better known as No Electrical Power ever Again - is a joke; when I was there, there was no electricity for weeks at a time, in a state capital; when it did work, it would be for about an hour a day), so if you have enough money you buy your own generator; if you want water, you dig a well or pay your neighbour for water from his well; there are no landlines, so everyone uses cell phones; if you don’t have a cell phone, there are people set up at little tables all over the place willing to rent the use of theirs; the roads are terrible, but there is nothing poor people can do about that, so you better hope your village is near the governor’s hometown; sanitation? in bigger cities private companies have started gathering recyclables; in smaller places it seems people just throw garbage on the street; in any case, the gov’t is not involved; when you build a house, you also build what they call a ‘suck away’ - a cess pool. When it is full a private company comes, sucks the sewage out, and dumps it in the ocean. And so on.
Hey, Onitsha is the biggest market in the world. If you’ve got something to sell, you’ll be able to find buyers there.
[quote=“Petrichor”]It isn’t often that you read an African’s economist’s opinion on aid for Africa. It’s quite an eye-opener.
spiegel.de/international/spi … 63,00.html[/quote]
I have read this before. He’s a libertarian, which explains why he has been castigated as the Uncle Tom pawn of the military-industrial phallocracy (that and the fact that he’s not a professional economist). I wouldn’t claim to be able to assess his statements on the basis of my own knowledge, but I have certainly seen similar statements by those in a position to know something about the situation first hand, so I’m sympathetic to his views.
[quote=“bababa”]
By the way, he is the son of a chief, and if you send him some money, he will make sure it goes to people who need it. (Just kidding.)[/quote]
I thought the idea was that he gave me $1,000,000 to keep safe in my bank account and I just loaned him some of my money for necessary expenses. :s
Seriously, thanks for your reply. It’s good to hear the inside story on these things. All that’s ever seen in the Western world of Africa is pictures of starving babies. Most people have a seriously skewed image of reality there (if it’s even possible to generalise about such a vast continent).
I think it must be apparent now to anyone who’s been an adult for the last forty years that aid doesn’t work. In fact, it seems to have made things worse. I can only imagine that Western governments have nefarious reasons for continuing with aid programmes. At the very least it’s just a way of trying to gild their image of being generous benefactors, but I think it’s really a lot more to do with wanting to maintain the status quo and vested interests in the aid industry.
This is interesting; in the West this is called ‘chattel slavery’.
I used the word ‘owner’ for a reason. It made me very uncomfortable when I first came across this custom there. Of course no Nigerian straight out told me that they keep three-year-olds as slaves, as they don’t see it that way. But as I gradually became accustomed to how people’s households were set up, it kind of looked like slavery to me. The only other Westerner I knew in Nigeria also had that uneasy feeling. It’s not just in how they describe the practice, it is also in how some of the children act - scared to death of making a mistake. I couldn’t figure out for quite a while why children were even spending so much time cooking and cleaning.
My Nigerian husband, however, insists they are not slaves, because they are not being bought and sold.
[quote=“Petrichor”][quote=“bababa”]
By the way, he is the son of a chief, and if you send him some money, he will make sure it goes to people who need it. (Just kidding.)[/quote]
I thought the idea was that he gave me $1,000,000 to keep safe in my bank account and I just loaned him some of my money for necessary expenses. :s
Seriously, thanks for your reply. It’s good to hear the inside story on these things. All that’s ever seen in the Western world of Africa is pictures of starving babies. Most people have a seriously skewed image of reality there (if it’s even possible to generalise about such a vast continent).
I think it must be apparent now to anyone who’s been an adult for the last forty years that aid doesn’t work. In fact, it seems to have made things worse. I can only imagine that Western governments have nefarious reasons for continuing with aid programmes. At the very least it’s just a way of trying to gild their image of being generous benefactors, but I think it’s really a lot more to do with wanting to maintain the status quo and vested interests in the aid industry.[/quote]
Read the Lords of Poverty
http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Poverty-Prestige-Corruption-International/dp/0871134691
Worth reading is Banker to the Poor by Mahammad Yunus.
Very interesting read on foreign aid and NGOs in one of the world’s poorest countries.
One of my favourite destinations too. Pristine countryside…no one has any money to pollute it with fertiliser or plastics.
[quote]In “Creating a World Without Poverty,” Muhammad Yunus has written a dangerous book. Not so much for his goal – that’s merely outlandish, since most people expect the poor will always be. Besides, Yunus knows how to make audacious ideas real – he created Grameen Bank to bring financial services to the poor, and proved that microfinance can be profitable and powerful. Doing so earned Yunus and Grameen the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize (arguably it should have been the Economics Prize).
What’s dangerous are his questions. Like, if capitalism is so effective, why must 60 percent of the world’s population squeak by on six percent of its income? Why is it that China’s remarkable economic growth is ruining its environment? Why is poverty on the rise in the United States, even as its overall wealth skyrockets?
[/quote]