Stop Aiding Africa - The Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-26/stop-aiding-africa/

by bramanga • 17 years ago

17 20 17 years ago

samueladam4• 17 years ago

Africans are very creative and resourceful people.

Children are building their own toys, mechanics can repair any car or engine. If they are missing some elements, they will be built.

With so much ingenuity, it's hard to believe they need aid.

I really think the author has a good point, aid for Africa has always been to tell them how to do instead of letting them do it their own way.

Colonialism (and its newer version, aid) has had a bad impact in a sense that they've been taught to imitate the occidental world.

The culture and the people are different, the solutions must be different.

johnnybgoode2• 17 years ago

Although colonialism and aid might appear to be similar on the surface, there are big differences between the two. The motives were not at all the same, and they had very different results.

samueladam4• 17 years ago

Of course, they are completely different. Some of the guilt of colonialism has been transformed into aid.

I was referring to the influence both have on not considering Africans as people who can handle themselves. It will take time, trial and error, but those can't be avoided.

anamax• 17 years ago

> The motives were not at all the same, and they had very different results.

Yes, the results of colonialism were significantly better for the colonized.

However, to be fair to the folks who think that intent matters even when the result is a horrorshow time and time again, the colonial-era missionary work was significantly more effective than post-colonial non-religious aid. Then again, the post-colonial missionary work has been more effective than post-colonial non-religious aid.

That's not to say that missionary work has always been a great thing. On the other hand, beating the record of non-religious aid isn't all that hard.

mahmud3• 17 years ago

Africans are very creative and resourceful people.

Hey, thanks! You non-Africans seem that way to us as well. Maybe it's just something we all humans have in common?

Children are building their own toys, mechanics can repair any car or engine. If they are missing some elements, they will be built.

I have noticed the same thing in the Chinese, South Asians, Latin Americans, South East Asians, East Europeans and ex Soviets! Actually, I might be on to something here. All poor people are just good at fixing things, usually bicycles, and recycling. It's like, necessity taught them or something.

I have also noticed that people in the developed world are just as good at "fixin" things, albeit non-physical things. I greatly admire your ability to "startup" and advance your lives in anyway possible. Sometimes I wonder if our ancestral village elder traveled to your lands and tutored you in the ways of survival. Amazing you are!

samueladam4• 17 years ago

You missed my point. Those sentences were to introduce the fact that they don't need help they're not asking for.

Why do you feel the need to take them as offending?

Those are things i admire in Africa, like the fact that you are considered as a human being rather than a consumer. Yes, because of the lack of wealth as we know it in occidental countries, but wealth can take many forms.

TrevorJ• 17 years ago

I once traveled to Africa with a documentary film crew. One of our battery packs broke and a local was able to whip out a soldering iron and take the whole thing apart. He quickly identified the fuse as the offending part. Rather than asking if we happened to have a spare, he simply heated the fuse, teased the metal end caps off it and used a bit of similar-gauged wire to rebuild the fuse itself. This all happened in under ten minutes in a dark hallway while he was sitting on the floor.

Sure, lots of people in lots of places are handy with various things but here in the states we rarely HAVE to fix things with no possibility of acquiring replacement parts, so I think sometimes it doesn't even occur to us to try.

joel_feather2• 17 years ago

Aid to Africa is minimal. Compare the GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa. excluding South Africa to the amount of Aid received - it's minimal and insignificant.

CWuestefeld2• 17 years ago

Citations, please?

It seems I'm always seeing celebrities pontificating, news stories mentioning doctors donating time at African clinics, and media spectacles like USA for Africa. We see articles about programs aimed at reducing suffering from malaria, and at AIDS education.

It thus appears to me that much investment is being made. Can you quantitatively show otherwise?

joel_feather2• 17 years ago

Look it up. 700 million from the US to Africa. GDP of a country like ghana is 20 billion. Look up the rest of the numbers yourself.

vitaminj• 17 years ago

I was rather underwhelmed by this book, which has somewhat blunt policy prescriptions (eg. stop accepting foreign aid, take chinese money, issue bonds, etc) for what probably deserves a more nuanced and considered approach.

I think Shanta Devarajan's assessment of the book is spot on (this guy is the chief economist at the African world bank) - http://africacan.worldbank.org/a-partial-defense-of-dambisa-...

Stop Aiding Africa - The Daily Beast

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