Dead Aid

Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa

by Dambisa Moyo

tagged: economic policy, economic development, developing countries

Description

The provocative New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller offers a controversial road map to address the desperate poverty in Africa.

The subject of a media blitz, Dead Aid continues to generate heated debate in the aid community. Bono's organization, one, organized a campaign against the author, Dambisa Moyo, who was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of 2009. In the past 50 years, more than $1 trillion in aid has gone to Africa. In this "incendiary new book" (Daily Mail), Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world's poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in poverty-without reliance on foreign aid. Dead Aid is an unsettling yet optimistic work, a powerful challenge to the assumptions and arguments that support a profoundly misguided postwar development policy in Africa.

About the Author

Dambisa Moyo

Born and raised in Zambia, Dambisa Moyo received a Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University and a master's degree from Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. A former consultant for the World Bank and an investment banker specializing in emerging markets at Goldman Sachs, she is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dead Aid.

Editorial Reviews

"Moyo has the world's ear, and for good reason. When you think of all the talking heads you see on news programs, how many of them are women from the nations and situations being discussed?"

— Flare Magazine

"A radical, counterintuitive solution to the continent's economic problems...[Moyo] is unequivocal, not to mention convincing."

— Failure Magazine

"The evidence assessing the impact of aid on economic growth (or the lack thereof) is comprehensive and convincing."

— Apoorva Shah, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

"Dambisa Moyo makes a compelling case for a new approach in Africa. Her message is that Africa's time is now. It is time for Africans to assume full control over their economic and political destiny. Africans should grasp the many means and opportunities available to them for improving the quality of life. Dambisa is hard -- perhaps too hard -- on the role of aid. But her central point is indisputable. The determination of Africans, and genuine partnership between Africa and the rest of the world, is the basis for growth and development."

— Kofi Annan, former Secretary-General of the United Nations

"It all provokes a question: Why is it that in certain Canadian circles, the ideas of Moyo, Collier and Easterly aren't part of the national conversation about foreign aid? We seem to prefer looking through rose-tinted glasses, evaluating the worth of foreign aid not on what's being achieved but on how much is being dispensed."

— National Post

"Dead Aid calls for a new way of thinking...This book offers a fresh insight into the plight of poverty and a vision for developmental change -- the kind of change that could help millions."

— Relevant

"Moyo's indictment of the past 50 years of aid-giving is compelling...[She] has written a well-informed book, and her passionate commitment to improving Africa's fortunes drips from every page."

— Geographical

"Dead Aid is an important book...at the very least, [it] provides a first step towards changing how America, and the world, thinks about how to help Africa."

— Real Clear World

"Moyo is right to raise her voice, and she should be heard if African nations and other poor countries are to move in the right direction."

— Foreign Affairs

"The wisdom contained here -- if absorbed by African and global policymakers -- will turn this chronically depressed continent into an inspiring miracle of dazzling economic growth."

— Steve Forbes, President and Chief Executive Officer of Forbes and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes ma

"Dead Aid is a wonderfully liberating book."

— The Washington Times

"Dambisa Moyo is to aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam. Here is an African woman, articulate, smart, glamorous, delivering a message of brazen political incorrectness: cut aid to Africa. Aid, she argues, has not merely failed to work; it has compounded Africa's problems. Moyo cannot be dismissed as a crank...She catalogues evidence, both statistical and anecdotal...The core of her argument is that there is a better alternative [and it deserves] to be taken seriously."

— The Independent

"Moyo presents a refreshing view."

— Newsweek

"A tightly argued brief...Vivid."

— The Wall Street Journal

"An incendiary new book...Here is a refreshing voice...What makes Dead Aid so powerful is that it's a double-barrelled shotgun of a book. With the first barrel, Moyo demolishes all the most cherished myths about aid being a good thing. But with the second, crucially, she goes on to explain what the West could be doing instead."

— The Daily Mail

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