When Aid Goes Wrong January 17, 2016
Posted by OromianEconomist in Uncategorized.Tags: Aid, Aid and Development, Aid Industry, Aid to Africa, Dead Aid, Ethiopia:When Aid Goes Wrong, George Ayittey: Africa's cheetahs versus hippo, The Guardian, The refugee who took on the British government
trackback
The World Bank accepted a rap on the knuckles for the massive flaws in the PBS programme but did not cancel it. DfID re-routed funds to other programmes in Ethiopia, the aid flowed to the authoritarian regime as before. In late 2015 and early 2016, famine threatened. No one asked the obvious question: how much has Ethiopia’s brutal, donor funded, economic experiment contributed to the collapse in livelihoods?
Of all the academic economists working on Ethiopia, I could not find one who was willing to speak on the record for this article. Much of the professional field of development studies is dependent on DfID research grants, with many academics serving on multimillion-pound study teams.
“If you challenge the consensus and make headlines, it is going to make your life harder,” said one economist at a London university, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Evaluations of PBS relied on figures supplied by the Ethiopian government; there were huge, unexamined risks of corruption in funnelling the money through the Ethiopian treasury, and the metrics used to measure success were simply the things purchased by the programme, such as schools built, wells dug, pupils enrolled or teachers hired. The donors had, in fact, no way of measuring whether those things actually benefitted the populations concerned.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/ethiopian-refugee-who-took-on-the-british-government
Development in Ethiopia’s capital city. But at what cost?
Most more economically developed countries give aid to those that are less developed and this is almost always seen as a positive thing. However there have been cases when the aid provided has done more harm than good.
This article looks at the situation in Ethiopia. This country has been a major recipient of western aid since the 1980s and much of it seems to have been successful in helping the country to develop and to fend off the worst of the famines that ravaged the country in the past. Currently though the development drive in Ethiopia has been implicated in forcing people off their land and in to less fertile areas.
It is a long read but full of information that could really develop your essay writing.
Consider the following points.
- Why are people being moved from their ancestral…
View original post 23 more words
Oromian Economist 
Comments»
No comments yet — be the first.