It's common to rail against white foreigners implementing aid. But is there evidence that poor people respond better to programs run by locals? Or is it simply that locals know more about what's going on -- which I guess would suggest that the white aid people just need to be well-informed?
It's more the second than the first -- the local people just know so much more about local conditions. Especially when there's some social entrepreneur working on one specific problem rather than the U.N. trying to achieve Millennium Challenge goals.
What are those goals exactly?
According to Sachs, they recommend 449 separate interventions to achieve improvements in the 54 indicators of poverty and suffering and to try and achieve this by 2015. That's just an impossible, unworkable plan.
Wouldn't the 449 interventions be 449 small plans, rather than one Big Plan?
When Sachs and I talked, he kept insisting that what he's doing is not a "plan," and then I quoted large sections of books he writes that talk about planning and strategies back to him. I think he may not like the word because it's become pejorative -- it sounds like a top-down plan to me. It was designed by 250 world experts meeting on task forces and writing reports -- that's an expert-driven approach. Very top down.
What are we to do about countries with corrupt governments?
The aid business has been stuck on this problem. You get people who say, "Well, the government is not really so bad, let's give them money anyway." Which is what I read the U.N. and Sachs as saying. And then you get people like the U.S. government and the IMF and World Bank saying, "Let's supply tough love and we'll only give aid if they reform."
Both of these approaches have been tried and neither has worked. First of all, all the governments are not good governments so the first camp is way out of their depth. Second, although it might sound good in principle -- these structural adjustment loans -- all the empirical evidence is that aid is not successful in changing behavior. An awful lot of people agree that that's been a failure. It was applied widely in Africa, the Soviet Union (called "shock therapy"), Latin America, the Middle East and somewhat less in Asia.
Part of the secret of the success in Asia is that they're in a stronger position to resist being told what to do. They're big, old civilizations that have strong senses of nationalism and self-determination and they have a big weight on the international scene.
But is there a way to bypass corrupt governments?
I think so. Try and get help to individuals and make products and services available that don't depend on governments. There's been this country obsession in the foreign aid business that somehow the objective is to fix countries.
Well, so they can help themselves eventually.
I don't think countries are what matter so much; I think aid should just try and help individuals. That would free up enormous amount of money and reserves (now being wasted on trying to reform governments) into programs just focused on poor people. On getting drugs and textbooks to the poor. Doing things like the Gates Foundation: trying to create a malaria vaccine.
Is that organization effective?
The Gates Foundation is definitely more creative than official aid agencies, but they have to be diplomatic also. Gates is caught halfway in between the conventional wisdom and trying to think of new approaches that work better.
Your book is pointedly called "The White Man's Burden." It's often said that aid is an extension of colonialism. But isn't it to a certain extent an effort to rectify the damage done by colonialism?
I don't think aid is a nefarious conspiracy to keep control in countries that used to be colonies. But it is part of the kind of colonial mind-set that has persisted. Kipling's "white man's burden" saw colonials as these benign white people bringing civilization to these people. It was put in much more p.c. language and became "foreign aid," but still with rich, white people in charge thinking they knew the answers. There certainly isn't the overt racism as before, but there is paternalism.
What's happening now in countries like the Congo and Sierra Leone and Sudan and all these failed states -- there's this new rhetoric which I find worrisome that we should do something like shared sovereignty or trusteeships. That sounds a lot like colonialism to me. I'm not saying we'll re-colonize -- that certainly won't happen -- but they are failed states where very intrusive political and military intervention is taking place, which is somehow seen as the same package as foreign aid. That's very neocolonial. I get invitations now and then to attend workshops with soldiers and aid workers who learned how to work side by side to reform society. Those e-mails scare the daylights out of me. That's the last thing that should happen.
Not to overkill something that has been overkilled, but in Iraq we're showing signs of these bad tendencies: military and aid are part of same package.
But are you saying we should never intervene militarily, even during genocide? You mentioned Sudan.
One should never say never. It's very hard to watch "Hotel Rwanda" and say the West should never intervene. I'm sure if we're on the ground in Darfur it would be very hard to say the West should keep hands off. But again, that's the contrast between the grandiose plans to fix whole countries vs. the piecemeal apparatus that tries to help individuals and solve specific problems. Even with military intervention I think this same divide could apply. Yes, try and figure out a way to rescue civilians in Darfur from rape and murder and burning villages, but certainly do not attempt to invade Sudan and achieve regime change that is aimed at turning Sudan into an oasis of peace and prosperity. Just have more specific doable things that you can be held accountable for.
About the writer
Suzy Hansen, a former editor at Salon, is an editor at the New York Observer.
Related Stories
How Paul Wolfowitz can save the world
Hardheaded, passionate and conservative in the old-fashioned sense, Jeffrey Sachs' new book could -- but probably won't -- show the next head of the World Bank how to end global poverty.
03/27/05
Story finder (3 ways to search Salon)
Salon Directory (browse by topic)