David Brooks, in his Editorial to the NYT touches on the age old
debate of how foreign policy can end poverty in africa. is it through
increasing the amount of aid, or focusing on 'building democracy' and
insitutions in africa...?

i agree with a lot of his points that money alone won't solve the
issue. we do need to build institutions that can address these
challenges. most of the time, my frustration is that africans are not
given the space to build instutions that work for them. however, when
people have built institutions based on their ideas of what they want
these institutions to achieve, the results have been remarkable. Take
for example, target="new" class="bodytxt">Community Foundation for the Western
Region of Zimbabwe. It was built by people in rural communities
and is effective in enabling them to address issues that are
important to them. part of why people are poor, in addition to not
having access to finances, and also in that they have had their
cultures and tools for creating wealth stripped form them, they do
not have access to institutions and systems that affect their lives.
so in building these institutions, i feel that it is important to
enable people to create institutions that make a determine how
programs are implemented, and what the priorities are--makes sense to
me.

~the dumi


From the The New York Times
Editorial Pages


Liberals, Conservatives and Aid

By DAVID BROOKS
Karl Rove has his theories about what separates liberals from
conservatives and I have mine. Mine include the differences between
Jeffrey Sachs and George Bush.

Jeffrey Sachs, as you may know, is the Columbia University economist
who has done more to put poverty in Africa atop the global agenda
than anybody else. He has hectored and lobbied the developed world to
forgive debts, set goals and increase aid to ameliorate the suffering
of the extremely poor.

But Sachs is a child of the French Enlightenment. At the end of his
new book, "The End of Poverty," he delivers an unreconstructed
tribute to the 18th-century Enlightenment, when leading thinkers had
an amazing confidence in their ability to refashion reality so that
it would conform to reason.

Throughout the book, Sachs comes across as a philosophe for our
times. He is, he writes, a "clinical economist," who diagnoses the
maladies that affect nations the way a doctor diagnoses and holds
life-or-death sway over a human organism. One of the striking
features of his book is the absence of individual Africans. There is
just the undifferentiated mass of the suffering poor, trapped in
systems, and Sachs traveling around the globe prescribing treatments.

Sachs is also a materialist. He dismisses or downplays those who
believe that human factors like corruption, greed, institutions,
governance, conflict and traditions have contributed importantly to
Africa's suffering. Instead, he emphasizes material causes: lack of
natural resources, lack of technology, bad geography and poverty
itself as a self-perpetuating trap.

This gives him an impressive confidence on the malleability of human
societies. Though $2.3 trillion has been spent over the past 50 years
to address global poverty, without producing anything like the
results we would have hoped for, Sachs is sure that with his
insights, and most important, with more money, extreme poverty can be
eliminated with one big, final push. "We can realistically envision a
world without extreme poverty by the year 2025," he writes. "Ending
the poverty trap will be much easier than it appears," he declares.

Sachs, who tends to regard anyone who disagrees with him as immoral,
is contemptuous of the Bush administration. The Bush folks, he
charges, have failed the poor.

The Bush administration has nearly doubled foreign aid, but it will
not spend the amounts Sachs wants. The Bush folks, at least when it
comes to Africa policy, have learned from centuries of conservative
teaching - from Burke to Oakeshott to Hayek - to be skeptical of
Sachsian grand plans. Conservatives emphasize that it is a fatal
conceit to think we can understand complex societies, or rescue them
from above with technocratic planning.

The Bush folks, like most conservatives, tend to emphasize
nonmaterial causes of poverty: corrupt governments, perverse
incentives, institutions that crush freedom. Conservatives appreciate
the crooked timber of humanity - that human beings are not simply
organisms within systems, but have minds and inclinations of their
own that usually defy planners. You can give people mosquito nets to
prevent malaria, but they might use them instead to catch fish.

Instead of Sachs's monumental grand push to end poverty, the Bush
administration has devised the Millennium Challenge Account, which is
not dismissed by Sachs, but not heralded either. This program is
built upon the assumption that aid works only where there is good
governance and good governance exists only where the local folks
originate and believe in the programs. M.C.A. directs aid to
countries that have taken responsibility for their own reform.

It has the faults of its gradualist virtues. I recently sat in on a
meeting in Mozambique between local and American officials. It was
clear that the program, while well conceived, has been horribly
executed. The locals had been given only the vaguest notions of what
sort of projects the U.S. is willing to finance. After two years of
trying they had received nothing.

Nonetheless, the Bush approach, when reformed, at least builds on the
experience of the past decades, while Sachs, as reviewers have
noticed, repeats the 1960's. If, à la Sachs, we assume money
translates easily into growth, if we pour aid into Africa without
regard to local institutions, we will do little good, we will exhaust
donors and we will discredit the aid enterprise for years to come.

E-mail: dabrooks@nytimes.com