Time to attack myth of Western superiority

This implies that donors have to deliver aid in a fashion that does not allow developing country governments to shirk that responsibility, nor shift their citizens’ expectations away from their own governments to those of the donors.

Indeed, the type of aid that removes the link of accountability between political leaders and their electorate ultimately perpetuates poor governance and poverty.

Aid must be channelled through recipient budgets to allow domestic accountability.

I also agree with Moyo’s observation that too much aid has been driven by donors own economic and geopolitical interests. Where ‘aid’ is given for geopolitical or export promotion objectives, it was never intended to reduce poverty; thus we should not be surprised if it does not.

Trade policies
Finally, she is also right about the importance of trade relative to aid, and the need to make trade rules fairer.

Alas, while the EU has pledged more coherence between trade policies and development objectives for more than 15 years, we still fail to provide genuine market access to the poorest countries, or to reform our agricultural policies.

However, I disagree with Moyo’s conclusion that if aid does not work, we should quit the aid business. We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater, but should draw the lessons from its failures and successes.

And that is exactly what we have been doing the last decade.

Now, seriously, for the first time in aid history we do have an agreed broad-ranging agenda of measures to ensure that aid genuinely contributes to development.

The Paris-Accra agreements are not just slogans or buzzwords —each is backed up by a series of practical reforms, deeply grounded in reality, and responding to past failures, including the many ills Moyo points out.

Without aid
What worries me most about Moyo is that she does not say much new: it has all been said before by Peter Bauer in the 60s and 70s (she was fair enough to dedicate her book to him) and by William Easterly a few years ago.

By now it is not good enough for us in the aid business to just say we have heard it and debate the finer points.

It is time to implement Paris-Accra, so that aid responds to genuine local needs, builds local capacity to manage development, and makes governments responsible and accountable.

But implementation has been lagging as it demands political leadership and understanding of the rationale for the Paris-Accra reforms by public opinion in general and parliamentarians in particular.

Moyo has done us a great favour by providing the platform, generating interest in these issues in mainstream media, and providing the right arguments for these urgent reforms.