Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Nick Kristof hits on the one of the more confusing aspects of the foreign aid debate.  While it’s true that large scale aid projects to encourage growth have largely failed, especially in Africa, there’s no reason not to pursue public health projects whose goals are more limited – simply decreasing the number of malaria infections, for example, which kills around 1 million people a year.  If we reoriented our aid practice to be both humbler and smarter, we might be able to save millions of lives, while improving political support for aid.

The larger problem is that the way many aid agencies work – whether they be USAID or the World Bank, is that they think of aid as largely a tool to stimulate economic growth.  In this growth/development framework, modest goals, such as decreasing deaths due to malaria and other easily preventable infectious diseases, become sidelined, while large infrastructure projects and the like are promoted that are largely ineffectual on improving growth and thus aid becomes tainted as “ineffective” when really it needs to be reoriented.