While working full-time as part of the Goldman Sachs global investment firm, Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian economist and writer wrote the very popular book titled Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (2009). This was a book that had the capability to change people’s previous thoughts about aid given to African nations. Moyo has continued to write books on this topic and has been able to speak her ideas on behalf of the African people. She has a keen plethora of ideas about the dynamic of interrelationships between impoverished states of her native Africa, emerging economies such as China, and established first world nations such as the United States.
You may remember the LIVE Aid benefit concerts of the mid 1980s and songs and fundraising that went along with it. Moyo argues that the millions upon millions of dollars donated by this effort and various organizations such as the World Bank have effectively perpetuated poverty in Africa. The foreign aid over the past few decades, instead of being invested in economically viable job-creating activities, has lined the pockets of corrupt administrators and created a habit of dependency in the African client states.
Emmanuel Rincón writing for FEE had a good summary of the situation. He states, “What a continent like Africa needs is investment in economic fields that generate structures of sustained development. This requires education, of course,, but also the promotion of an entrepreneurial culture, to produce employment and raise the continent’s production, which is the only thing that can allow Africans to have their own homes and eat their own food in a couple of decades, without having to depend on the arrival of money from developed countries.”