Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Which aid

Greg Mills lives in Africa and heads up the Brenthurst Foundation that tries to promote "positive economic change in order to strengthen the importance of Africa in the global market." He's just passionate about helping Africans create wealth to improve their standard of living.

Like other Africans (click on "Africa" under Labels on the right), he sees "development aid" (not emergency aid) as having a bad effect on African lives because it perpetuates a paternalistic prejudice that sees Africans as helpless - and actually creates that situation to some extent.

To judge from this article, apparently Bob Geldof still argues for development aid from western governments though he also has added business investment to the solution (see last Friday's post).

The central issue as I see it is that development aid from the outside will never answer Africa's needs. As Bono said, aid is short-term. It's just not good enough.

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