Tracking the West's failures of foreign aid
Book Review from SF Chronicle
by Manfred Wolf

"The White Man's Burden; Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good; By William Easterly"

William Easterly puts the failure of foreign aid down to a gigantic act of non-listening, of imposing grand schemes on hapless, desperate countries. Easterly, now a professor of economics at New York University, was for 16 years a senior research economist at the World Bank.

In his latest book, "The White Man's Burden," he sets himself against his former employers, as well as the International Monetary Fund, and by extension against such utopians as the economist Jeffrey Sachs, for being "Planners," who impose grandly conceived solutions that the recipients can't or won't implement and for which the donors are not held accountable. (That the most grandiose form of Planning, large-scale military intervention, is equally futile should not surprise anyone.)

When there are successes, these usually result from limited undertakings. Aid organizations can score with such projects as Food for Education in Bangladesh, a stipend for parents who send their children to school, or the Rural Roads Program in Peru, but these do not flow from grandiose schemes. More commonly, successes in the huge foreign aid programs of the past 50 years derive from "Searchers," people who devise small programs with limited goals -- vaccination schemes or sanitation improvements -- that often originate locally with people searching for remedies. Because the world's poorest have the least clout, the need for Searchers is all the greater.

Full story here.