Jeffery Sachs Says Moyo’s Confused Attack On Aid For Africa

Here’s Jeffery’s Sach’s response to Dambisa Moyo’s attacks on African aid. ( I sense some tension between the two.)

Click Here To Read Jeffery Sachs Response To Dambisa Moyo’s Claims on Aid For Africa

Synopsis (Via Jeffery Sachs @ Vox.eu)

Aid critics have recently been blaming aid as the source of Africa’s poverty. This column explains how Africa has long been struggling with rural poverty, tropical diseases, illiteracy, and lack of infrastructure and that the right solution is to help address these critical needs through transparent and targeted public and private investments. This includes both more aid and more market financing.

Article Introduction (Via Jeffery Sachs @ Vox.eu)

Ms. Dambisa Moyo’s recent Huffington Post article exposes the confusions that underlie her slashing attacks on aid. Most importantly, she seems to believe that sub-Saharan Africa was economically prosperous and then was pushed into poverty by aid. She makes the following statement: “No surprise, then, that Africa is on the whole worse off today than it was 40 years ago. For example in the 1970’s less than 10% of Africa’s population lived in dire poverty — today over 70% of sub-Saharan Africa lives on less than US$2 a day.”

Additional Excerpt (Via Jeffery Sachs @ vox.eu)

Moyo now campaigns against the kinds of aid that can keep millions of African children from dying or being maimed for a lifetime through the consequences of serious episodes of disease. She advocates cutting the aid that has allowed more than 2 million Africans access to life-saving AIDS treatment, since governments are involved. Almost unimaginably, she opposes the distribution of anti-malaria bed nets for Africa’s hundreds of millions of young people on the alleged grounds that it has put bed net producers in Africa out of business.

Click Here To Read Jeffery Sachs Response To Dambisa Moyo’s Claims on Aid For Africa