Fighting Poverty by Helping Women

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn have written a great article for the New York Times Magazine on the importance of improving the lives of women and girls in the developing world. It's adapted from their book, “Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.”

In the early 1990s, the United Nations and the World Bank began to proclaim the potential resource that women and girls represent. “Investment in girls’ education may well be the highest-return investment available in the developing world,” Larry Summers wrote when he was chief economist of the World Bank. Private aid groups and foundations shifted gears as well. “Women are the key to ending hunger in Africa,” declared the Hunger Project. The Center for Global Development issued a major report explaining “why and how to put girls at the center of development.” CARE took women and girls as the centerpiece of its anti-poverty efforts. “Gender inequality hurts economic growth,” Goldman Sachs concluded in a 2008 research report that emphasized how much developing countries could improve their economic performance by educating girls.

Read the whole thing.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame on Aid

President Kagame has an op-ed in the Financial Times on the "aid culture" in Africa. (Registration required.) He argues, "The cycle of aid and poverty is durable: as long as poor nations are focused on receiving aid they will not work to improve their economies."

The Foreign Policy blog has some observations.

Then again, it's both fantastic and unsurprising to hear Kagame promising to wean his country from development aid -- through savy business ventures and smart economic policy. In fact, that's what the president has already started to do, and it's the reason that many consider Rwanda the emerging Singapore of Sub-Saharan Africa. The example is one to follow -- and not just in the developing world.

A previous post on Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid, which is mentioned in Kagame's article, is here.

Cautious Optimism for Haiti

Starting over, from the Mary O'Grady of the Wall Street Journal. Investment seems to be the word of the day.

But the PM seems to also understand that the aid bucket is leaky at best. At the Journal she talked up private investment as the key to a meaningful reduction in misery. "We need investors," she said, "because we need to create jobs. And to get investors, whether they are from the private sector in Haiti or international, they have to have confidence."

Ms. Pierre-Louis may need help too. She doesn't have a political base, Bill Clinton is showing renewed interest in Haiti (not good), and powerful local interests want her out. She might survive if those who truly care about Haiti realize that her defeat would be a grave loss for her country. Hopefully this includes the U.S., which has enormous influence in Haiti and also should want to see the Western Hemisphere's poorest country get off its knees.

(I'm not sure that Bill Clinton having present-day "interest" in Haiti is a bad thing though. I wish there was more explanation of that comment.)

Some background (also from O'Grady) on the telecom kickbacks mentioned in the article here.

Foreign Aid and Corrupt Politics in Africa

Francis Fukuyama reviews and compares Wangari Maathai and Dambisa Moyo's books on foreign aid.

Their books would seem to bear little resemblance as well. In The Challenge for Africa, Maathai offers a diffuse array of conclusions. She argues that there is no inherent trade-off between economic growth and environmental protection and that African governments should pursue both. She blames Western colonialism for devaluing African identity and culture but blames Africans as well for their bloody attachment to fractured "micro-nations." She criticizes aid dependency and yet has no strong objections to the Sachs-Bono agenda of ramping up Western development assistance. She believes that change will have to come through grassroots activism and that Africans must embrace their own traditions.

Moyo's book, Dead Aid, by contrast, has a very simple message: that outside development assistance is at the root of Africa's underdevelopment and ought to be stopped quickly and totally if the continent is to progress. She is in favor of private-sector development, even if it comes from China, and inveighs against agricultural protectionism in the North that prevents trade from becoming an engine of growth. Not surprisingly, her book will appeal to a crowd very different from those who awarded Maathai the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai and Moyo might indeed seem to be headed for a polarized Sachs-Easterly style shootout over approaches to development.

But the truth is that these books have more in common than their authors may admit. Both women see sub-Saharan Africa's fundamental problem not as one of resources, human or natural, or as a matter of geography, but, rather, as one of bad government. Far too many regimes in Africa have become patronage machines in which political power is sought by "big men" for the sole purpose of acquiring resources—resources that are funneled either back to the networks of supporters who helped a particular leader come to power or else into the proverbial Swiss bank account. There is no concept of public good; politics has devolved instead into a zero-sum struggle to appropriate the state and whatever assets it can control.

A previous post mentioning Dambisa Moyo is here.

Liberian President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf

Time Magazine's 10 Questions for Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female head of state in Africa.
Check out her appearance on the Daily Show as well. Her memoir about her extraordinary life is called, This Child Will Be Great.

With the criticisms recently launched against foreign aid programs, do you think Africa is better off without them? Cherae Robinson, ATLANTA [The same issue of Time features Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid, as one of the 100 Most Influential People.]

No, Africa can still use structured, focused aid. The problem is that aid should be properly used. It must support the government's own development agenda. And the country itself should use its own resources well. I think in a few places in Africa, this is happening.

What impact is the trial of Charles Taylor having on Liberia's prospects for peace and stability? Jeremy Waiser FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE [Charles Taylor, former President of Liberia, is on trial by the Special Court for Sierra Leone.]

I think Liberians want to put the Taylor era behind them. They want to lead normal lives. They want peace. They're tired of the turmoil that he represented. He's a diminishing figure in Liberia's life.

Image from Vital Voices Global Partnership.