At the beginning of this month, four highly articulate and accomplished academics -- Stephen Lewis, Paul Collier, Hernando De Soto and Dambisa Moyo -- gathered in Toronto to debate the resolution "Be it resolved, foreign aid does more harm than good." With two arguing for and two against, the speeches and accompanying materials posted on this site present the foreign aid debate in a compelling and accessible manner.
Their views represent the wide spectrum of intelligent views on foreign aid. On one hand, Stephen Lewis declares, "Truthfully, when I see what we can accomplish with money on the ground, it's the only time in my life I have wished I was Bill Gates." On the other hand, Dambisa Moyo asserts, "Evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower."
For further information on this debate, a good introductory book is Giles Bolton's (no relation to me) Aid and Other Dirty Business. His chapter on charity offers particularly good advice to people interested in donating money and time to nonprofits like Outreach International. For those who might want to dig a little deeper, Roger Riddell's book Does Foreign Aid Really Work? provides an excellent academic review of the history of and scholarly literature on aid.
-Matthew Bolton
These days, most talk about aid acknowledges the fact that good governance is a precondition of poverty eradication.
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