Stop Sending Aid to Dictators
* William Easterly <
http://time.com/author/william-easterly/>
* 13/03/2014
Traditional foreign aid often props up tyrants more than it helps the poor.
It's time for a new model
Too much of America's foreign aid funds what I call authoritarian
development. That's when the international community-experts from the U.N.
and other bodies-swoop into third-world countries and offer purely technical
assistance to dictatorships like Uganda or Ethiopia on how to solve poverty.
Unfortunately, dictators' sole motivation is to stay in power. So the
development experts may get some roads built, but they are not maintained.
Experts may sink boreholes for clean water, but the wells break down.
Individuals do not have the political rights to protest disastrous public
services, so they never improve. Meanwhile, dictators are left with cash and
services to prop themselves up-while punishing their enemies.
But there is another model: free development, in which poor individuals,
asserting their political and economic rights, motivate government and
private actors to solve their problems or to give them the means to solve
their own problems.
Compare free development in Botswana with authoritarian development in
Ethiopia. In Ethiopia in 2010, Human Rights Watch documented how the
autocrat Meles Zenawi selectively withheld aid-financed famine relief from
everyone except ruling-party members. Meanwhile democratic Botswana,
although drought-prone like Ethiopia, has enjoyed decades of success in
preventing famine. Government relief directed by local activists goes
wherever drought strikes.
In the postwar period, countries such as Chile, Japan, South Korea and
Taiwan have successfully followed the path of free development-often in
spite of international aid, not because of it. While foreign policy concerns
have often led America to prop up dictatorial regimes, we need a new rule:
no democracy, no aid. If we truly want to help the poor, we can't accept the
dictators' false bargain: ignore our rights abuses, and meet the material
needs of those we oppress. Instead, we must advocate that the poor have the
same rights as the rich everywhere, so they can aid themselves.
Easterly is the co-director of New York University's Development Research
Institute and author of The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and
the Forgotten Rights of the Poor
Received on Thu Mar 13 2014 - 16:54:21 EDT