"If anyone runs after money, their life will not have any beauty. It is boredom. A lot of people making a lot of money, billion, billions of dollars accumulating. Why are they coming for, finally, for philanthropy? Why the need for accumulating money, then doing philanthropy?From TED.
What if one decided to start philanthropy from day one?"
Three central propositions that encapsulate how thinking needs to change:
We need to narrow the target and broaden the instruments.
-- "The Bottom Billion" by Paul Collier, p. 192
"Growth is not a cure-all, but the lack of growth is a kill-all."
-- "The Bottom Billion" by Paul Collier, p. 190
Theory development led to what Schumpeter calls 'the pedestrian view that capital per se propels the capitalist engine'. The West started thinking that by sending capital to a poor country with no entrepreneurship, no governmental policy and no industrial system, they could produce capitalism. The consequence is that today we virtually stuff money down the throat of countries with no productive structure - where this money could be profitably invested - because they are not allowed to follow the industrial strategy all the presently rich countries followed.
Developing countries are given loans they cannot profitably utilize, and the whole process of development financing becomes akin to that of chain letters and pyramid games. Sooner or later the system breaks down, and the ones who designed it, standing close enough to the door when everybody rushes out, are able to make good financial profits, while the poor countries themselves are the losers. This is part of the mechanism that often creates larger flows of funds from the poor to the rich countries than the other way around, one of Gunnar Myrdal's 'perverse backwashes' of poverty.
-- "How Rich Countries Got Rich" by Erik S. Reinert p. 124
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| Taken from Brand Aid |
What if, one by one, African countries each received a phone call, telling them that in exactly five years the aid taps would be shut off - permanently? Although exceptions would be made for isolated emergency relief such as famine and natural disasters, aid would no longer attempt to address Africa's generic economic plight.Would many more millions in Africa die from poverty and hunger? Probably not - the reality is that Africa's poverty-stricken don't see the aid flows anyway. Would there be more wars, more coups, more despots? Doubtful - without aid, you are taking away a big incentive for conflict. Would roads, schools and hospitals cease being built? Unlikely.Isn't it likely that in a world freed of aid, economic life for the majority of Africans might actually improve, that corruption would fall, entrepreneurs would rise, and Africa's growth engine would start chugging?
-- Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid
[Moyo] ignores the fact that aid was only provided when countries meet requirements that restricted their own economy. Systematically pruning the government spending, privatizing and unmonitored opening of their markets for producers where developing countries bcan't compete with, one of the major causes for the current problems of Africa.
[...] When you want to address poverty, working on these root causes are the main assignment. If you don't do that, all the aid in the world won't have any effect on the development, but that doesn't mean that aid in itself would be useless.
[...] Aid alone is not sufficient to solve Africa's problems. Aid is a catalyst which can enstrengthen the development. That can only happen when the right climate is present, both internal as external.
Bogdan Vanden Berghe from the Flemish umbrella organisation '11 11 11' in "Don't blame aid" (article written in Dutch)
Her alternative (more free market, more trade with Asia than with Europe and the USA, more capitalism) is not very credible. But her analysis gets down to brass tacks. Every road constructed in Africa by the World Bank (or China), every hospital being furnished or every school built with foreign money, dismisses the local potentates of their responsibilities to do it themselves and therefore maintains the corruption.
Walter Zinzen, Belgian journalist: "Stop development aid" in De Standaard (article written in Dutch)
[...] we should question the quality of "growth", because basically we have a growth model that does not work for the majority of the people in the world. What we have in the world today is called "jobless growth" and "growth without equity".
In fact the growth that we have, particularly since the fall of the Berlin wall, when we have a surge of neoliberalism, we have seen actually virtually in every single country in the world the gap between rich and poor growing at an astronomical rate, and also the gap between rich and poor countries growing quite fundamentally. So when we talk about redifining development, we have to basically say that there are no holy cows and in that case, in that sense I think that Moyo her book is helpful as it makes a provocative statement.
While I disagree with the conclusion of it, some of the observations are obviously helpful.
Kumi Naidoo, South African human rights activist: debate with Dembisa Moyo
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| Cover of the book by Yash Tandon |
