# $200 is greater than the total annual income for most of africa.
This does bring up an interesting point, RE: how we prioritize our aid spending. As you note, $200 is far more money that most Africans could ever afford. Nonetheless, we spend lots of aid money to give Africans things that they couldn't afford. We subsidize AIDS treatments, anti-malarial spraying, free health clinics, etc, etc. The free market cost of many of those things is well beyond the average African's means. Is it better to provide these services in the top-down manner we are now, or should the money just be distributed to each person in a per-capita lump sum fashion? No doubt if we took all the money that is given in aid each year and just split it up among all of Africa's population and gave it as cash payments, it would result in a huge influx of cash into the local economies. Of course, we couldn't channel that aid - the recipients could choose to spend it on their health, but alternatively they could decide to risk their health and spend the money on something else, like a house, their business, or just a nice bottle of whisky. It's a sort of a Catch 22, I guess. By distributing aid money the way we do, we're essentially saying we don't trust Africans to spend the money in their own best interests (and, frankly, we don't). On the other hand, if we never give them a chance to make choices and learn from their mistakes, how will they ever move beyond dependency on Western handouts?
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Re: bullshit alert
Tue Jul 15, 2008 at 01:51:41 PM EST
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Life is full of both choices and mistakes, whether one is receiving aid from Western nations or not. I think that the current state of the continent of Africa, which is blighted by political corruption and instability, and by several different kinds of disease (HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, etc.), and by poverty, starvation, tribal conflict and various other ills, would serve as a hint to Africans that something is not right. But I do agree that there is a limit to what foreign aid can accomplish; at some point Africans have to take over their own destiny or they will never get anywhere.
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Re: bullshit alert
Tue Jul 15, 2008 at 02:04:10 PM EST
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would serve as a hint to Africans that something is not right.
I think it's obvious to them that something's not right. The problem isn't awareness, the problem is the way we're channeling that awareness. What Africans can do (rely on aid in the form of direct assistance like WHO clinics, etc.) may not be what Africans should do - but it's what we're telling them to do and it's what we're providing them incentives to do, so they really have no choice. The question I'm asking is whether these incentive structures we're presenting them are doing more harm then good. We may be making things just good enough that things never get bad enough to promote real change.
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Re: bullshit alert
Tue Jul 15, 2008 at 02:28:36 PM EST
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Considering how bad things are in many parts of Africa (such as Zimbabwe or Sudan, for example) as well as the severe problems in even the more successful nations such as Kenya, I do think that things are already bad enough to promote real change. Things are more than bad enough. But although many people do want change, the problems of Africa are very difficult to solve.
Considering the amount of foreign aid that African nations have received over the past 50 years or so, the results are extremely bad. I am not optimistic that more foreign aid will make the difference in 2008. However, while the continent remains in disastrously bad shape, there is no question that some Africans are living better lives as a result of foreign aid. Whether this will be enough to bring about larger social change, remains to be seen.
In any event, as others have noted in this discussion, even if we wanted to give aid to Africa, infertility is not really a priority problem (however unhappy some women are about their infertility and the accompanying social stigma). Much more fundamental problems remain to be addressed, including those (such as the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation) which give rise to infertility.
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Re: bullshit alert
Fri Jul 18, 2008 at 02:10:51 AM EST
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Considering the amount of foreign aid that African nations have received over the past 50 years or so, the results are extremely bad.
I'm curious if you have a figure for the amount of aid Africa has received over that period, and how it compares to what other areas have gotten.
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Africa = 15%
Fri Jul 18, 2008 at 06:31:35 AM EST
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Here's a series of charts showing where the US aid went (referred to as Official Development Assistance [ODA] in the charts) over the past couple of years. If I'm reading the charts correctly, the figures exclude military assistance. The big recipients of military assistance are Iraq, Israel and Egypt with the last two having been on the DoD teat to the tune of several billion dollars per year since the Camp David Accords were arrived at.
Illegitimi non carborundum.
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Correction.
Fri Jul 18, 2008 at 07:05:13 AM EST
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That 15% figure was based on ODA targeted over the period 1970-2006. Unfortunately, there was a 58% shortfall in ODA those years. Thus, the 15% share should be divided by the 42% of total ODA which was actually delivered, leaving Africa (as a region) recipient of 35% of all ODA during that period.
Illegitimi non carborundum.
