Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa
Dead Aid delivers a fierce and fearless indictment of the foreign aid system, arguing that what was meant to heal Africa may, in fact, be helping to hold it down. With unflinching logic and moral urgency, it dismantles the comfortable myth that money alone can fix poverty, revealing instead a cycle of dependency, corruption, and arrested growth. This is not a rejection of compassion—it is a challenge to rethink what true empowerment looks like. What if generosity, poorly aimed, becomes a weapon disguised as a gift? In the ruins of well-meant intentions, Dead Aid dares to ask what Africa truly needs to rise.
- Originally Published: 2009
- Publisher: Penguin, 2010
- Genre: Politics, Economics
- Pages: 188
- Book Type: Hardcopy
- ISBN: 978-0141031187
- Access: Members
Description
Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid reveals why millions are actually poorer because of aid, unable to escape corruption and reduced, in the West’s eyes, to a childlike state of beggary.
We all want to help. Over the past fifty years $1 trillion of development aid has flowed from Western governments to Africa, with rock stars and actors campaigning for more. But this has not helped Africa. It has ruined it.
Dead Aid shows us another way. Using hard evidence to illustrate her case, Moyo shows how, with access to capital and with the right policies, even the poorest nations can turn themselves around. First we must destroy the myth that aid works – and make charity history.
‘Articulate, self-confident and angry … this book marks a turning point’
~ Spectator
‘A damning assessment of the failures of sixty years of western development’
~ Financial Times
‘Kicks over the traditional piety that Western aid benefits the third world’
~ Sunday Herald Books of the Year
‘Dambisa Moyo makes a compelling case for a new approach’
~ Kofi Annan
‘This reader was left wanting a lot more Moyo, a lot less Bono’
~ Niall Ferguson
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