Owen Barder responds to those who claim that the West has spent over a trillion on aid in Africa. First point: it’s not true. Second:
The G-20 countries have, over the whole history of aid, given less aid to sub-Saharan Africa than they spent on fiscal stimulus in the single year of 2009.
Duncan Green has a review up of a new book on cash transfers, currently all the rage in social welfare thinking in the South. Cash transfers–simply giving money, at times without conditions–too the poor, is positioned as a truly ‘Southern’ solution to poverty. And one that, incidentally, seems to work. In general, people who need money use money well, and create demands for services from hospitals and other service providers, not to mention demands for food and small consumer goods. Green’s own employer has tested cash transfers in Vietnam with interesting results. Some questions remain about who pushes for cash transfers and why.
James Ferguson spoke about cash transfers a couple of years ago during a visit to U of Toronto. Nothing published yet, but this interview seems to sum up at least part of his argument nicely:
I think it’s partly about labor. For so long, there was this sort of terror of undermining the incentive to work, because what you needed to do was to get poor people (and this holds particularly in South Africa), and force them to work. Get them off their land and get them into the mine. Get them into the wage labor market so that their wage labor could be exploited and put to work. And we’re now looking at a world where there are loads of people willing to be exploited: there are actually loads of people willing to offer their labor yet there are no takers. So I think one of the things that may be going on is that poverty technocrats are starting to say, ‘Well, maybe undermining the motive to work is not such a problem because we don’t have jobs for these people anyway’. That’s one of the things I’m thinking about at least.
Capital does not need the poor. So why keep them in the labour pool anyway?
So I was a little snarky tweeting a couple of days ago about Bono and Geldof on the Globe and Mail. One viewer asked why we still needed White Men (TM) to speak for Africa, to which they responded with some humming and hawing, with Bono professing that he likes Africa so much that he has ‘gone native’ (which I guess makes him an African and thus able to speak for the continent?)
Now I have a great deal of respect for both of them – they don’t have to put all of this work into an important cause. I’ve been a Bono fan since his White House prayer breakfast, and his use of the “J” word. And a lot of the sour grapes that celebs get from development ‘experts’ is just that. On the whole, the two of been good for development.
At the same time, it doesn’t help for them to skirt the question. Why is it that we have two White Guys who specialize in singing editing a special issue of the Globe and Mail on Africa? They don’t have to shut up, but they could use their celebrety currency to turn attention not only to the problems and potentials of a continent, but also to share the stage to African leaders and activists. I don’t follow either Bono nor Geldof closely, but I cannot think of an interview given in a ‘rich’ country by either of them that included an African expert or celebrity alongside them. Why not?
And, no, Jeff Sachs and Angelina Jolie most certainly do not count. Even if they have gone native as well.
