[governance] Re: Does Africa Need Help?

[Daniel Oppermann]

I understood Stephane's comment in a different way. To me it seems that
he put the finger on the fact that Northern (or Western or
industrialized) countries do not spend money on development politics
just because they are "nice" but because it serves their own interests.

Development politics started during the Cold War to make sure who is on
your side. For the reason of national interests today the financial
flows go mainly to Asian and African countries almost ignoring poverty,
civil war and the question of failing states in Latin America. Looking
on the positive aspect: Latin American governments have to resolve their
problems on their own or with regional support which is definitely
better than waiting for someone to fix the problem.

Here is an interesting paper about the effectiveness of aid politics:

http://www.iadb.org/IDBDocs.cfm?docnum=1158725



David Goldstein schrieb:
> Stephane's comment is just like saying all African governments are incompetent and corrupt. It's partly true, it's changing, but definitely not always the case.
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at internatif.org>
> To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Nyangkwe Agien Aaron <nyangkweagien at gmail.com>
> Sent: Thursday, 19 June, 2008 7:53:05 PM
> Subject: [governance] Re: Does Africa Needs Help?
>
>   
>> Some recipient governments grasp exactly what donors want to hear,
>> readily agreeing to 'capacity building' programmes emphasising
>> increased accountability. They dutifully echo the donor's jargon,
>> while laughing behind our backs, and flicking through the latest
>> Mercedes catalogue for their new ministerial limousine.
>>     
>
> A long paper to avoid the obvious conclusion: aid is not intended to
> help the local people but to subsidize northern industries such as
> Mercedes (as in the above example) or Cisco (to take a example closer
> from our field). That way, most aid will come back to the North. 
>
>
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