If anything, all the back-and-forth about GNPs, geographical adversity, and microfinance is giving middle America a vocabulary lesson about aid to Africa and other parts of the developing world - and that's a good thing.Īs for jumping into the action, I, for one, am on Sachs' side - if for no other reason than the numbers don't lie: Only around 50,000 people were receiving lifesaving antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS in Africa in 2002, compared with 2.1 million people in 2007.
Still, I wouldn't say that the debate itself is farcical. In one of Sachs' recent Huffington Post retorts, " Aid Ironies," he begins with the line, "The debate about foreign aid has become farcical." I know what he means, especially in the context of the rest of the article, which basically refutes Moyo's assertions that aid to Africa is an enabler, perpetuating much of the continent's struggle for economic rise. OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but everything from The Charlie Rose Show to The Colbert Reporthas featured Moyo and her book in recent weeks, with repercussive effects in print and online. Although neither Sachs nor Moyo is a household name, their sparring (alongwith Easterly) here on the Huffington Post and in other news outlets has drummed up so much interest in the aid topic that even regular folks like me are chiming in with our two cents around the water cooler or trading foreign-aid tidbits with our neighbors as we unload groceries from our SUVs. Yet, as someone who's spent a few years advocating for the world's poorest people - many of whom live in Africa - what the ongoing debate between economists Jeffrey Sachs, Dambisa Moyo, and William Easterly says to me is that, no matter whose side you're on, you can't ignore the elephant in the room: extreme poverty in Africa is finally the hot topic we activists have wanted it to become for a long, long time. I'm not an economist, and I don't pretend to have any authority on financial matters involving huge sums of money between governments. And kudos to Jeffrey Sachs for continuing to defend his position so vehemently.
In reading and participating in the exchange about aid to Africa (in particular, the one that began with the ONE campaign's critique of Dambisa Moyo's book, Dead Aid, soon after its release back in March), I'm glad to see so many folks up in arms over the subject.
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