Paved with Good Intentions

Over the Christmas break, I read a book recommended to me by a professor in response to a deep sense of unease that I felt in some of my classes last semester. The author of "Dead Aid" Dambisa Moyo is a Zambian economist educated at Harvard and Oxford, and her thesis is far from politically correct: Development assistance funded by the West is doing more harm than good to the African continent. Against the voices that call for more and more aid to the developing world, she shows how the African nations' current dependence on foreign aid for recurring expenses breaks the ties of accountability between governments and their people, shifts the source of incentives from the prosperity of citizens to the whim of international development agencies, and fosters a culture of corruption. At face value, it makes sense that if a government depends on someone other than its own people for much of its revenue, it will not care as much about ensuring that the people live in a climate that fosters the growth of businesses and makes hard work profitable. It also makes sense that in the presence of a large pie of foreign money attracts those who would like to have a slice just to themselves - thus the Swiss bank accounts of African dictators and their aides.

A similar argument was recently put forward by Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist who also wonders how it is possible that since the 1960s the West pumped over $600 billion into Africa, but the GDP and life expectancy in most of the countries who received the aid have actually fallen. While the relationship between the two is hard to establish, especially given the HIV/AIDS pandemic, it is troubling to think that what we consider as goodwill and charity of Western nations may actually be contributing to the plight of countries where life expectancy is under 40, and most people live on less than a dollar a day. It is especially troubling to me given my current field of study, international education development, which trains Western specialists to help solve the problems of the developing world. The ensuing dilemma is not a comfortable one. Do you rush to the aid of people dying of hunger and preventable diseases and by your presence reinforce the deep causes behind these symptoms, so that the scenario is repeated in the next generation? Or do you, as Moyo sugessts, exercise "tough love" and turn off the stream of money that corrupts politicians, risking that your action might cost the sick and hungry of this generation their lives? Whose lives have more value - the sick and hungry of today, or those who will repeat their lot tomorrow if something does not change? And finally, why are the terms of this debate determined on American campuses and not by those whom they most intimately concern?

The older I get, the more questions. I persevere because I hope for a third way that is based neither on guilty charity nor on tough indifference. I don't know quite what it looks like, except that I know that it is harder, and in light of the Way of Jesus, I can't help but believe that it exists.