http://www.theguardian.com/global-devel ... dc-poverty

Private Eye brought up the issue years ago.

There have been fundamental changes in how aid is deployed. The D in CDC stands for development, and that is done by investing in businesses.

One of the old fashioned approaches is to try to hold development back in the 3rd world by keeping the populace rural. That has failed and cities like Nairobi are swamped with stinky shanty towns to prove it.
Another is to spend aid via infrastructure projects. That breeds corruption, and was inspired by shady geopolitical aims at the best of times.

What the CDC is doing is part of the new fashion.
Some of our aid goes to developing better government institutions (persuading the police and army to stay out of politics, and judges to be less thievy) and developing civil society (local NGOs, radio stations).
Some goes on education and health initiatives such as conditional payments for families who get their children inoculated and keep their daughters in school.
And some gets pumped into the wider economy - at a profit with any luck - to help boost the middle classes who are the ones that demand better education, cleaner government and cleaner children.

Private Eye and the venerable Guardian are appealing to your prejudice with some of their complaints. Western aid never used to lift anyone out of poverty. Now it works pretty well.

Exactly correct there SW

There's got about the notion that the sole job of aid is solely to repeatedly carry out famine and disaster intervention as though DfID were some weird, gestalt Bob Geldof.

If anybody here thinks that the old way works, get on a flight to Lusaka and have a look around. In particular, go and have a look at Kalingalinga or 'Garden', just two of the shanty towns surrounding the city. They're testimony to the tragic idiocy of the old way of doing aid.

And of course, once you have the shanty towns, it becomes incredibly difficult to actually do anything about them.