Smart Aid vs. Dead Aid

Imagine if Americans weren’t just out of work, trying to pay off their debt or save their homes but that they were so poor that they didn’t have clean water to drink, schools for their children or hospitals for their sick. Imagine if thousands of Americans were dying everyday from completely preventable causes.

This is great injustice of our world today. One billion people - one in every six people on the planet - are without access to safe water, sanitation, education and healthcare. Most struggle every day just to feed themselves, seeking to survive on a dollar a day. Others simply die because they are too poor to live. As Bono once wrote: “Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die."

Dambisa Moyo’s recent book Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa regurgitates an old message – that much aid in Africa has had little effect. Twenty years ago, Graham Hancock’s The Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige and Corruption of the International Aid Business carried a similar message.

Dead Aid suggests that if we stop giving to Africa things will improve. The risk of this message is that it will fuel cynicism and cause potential donors to once again abandon the poor in developing countries, and specifically in Africa, in their hour of need.

The real challenge - and opportunity - is how to address and resolve the issues, devise and implement solutions and to move forward in an era of sustainable, impactful and cost-effective aid and development.

Much progress has been made over the past few years, particularly by the new breed of private philanthropists who are working as social investors and social entrepreneurs, combining compassion and innovation with business-like approaches.

“Smart Aid” is a compassionate, effective and integrated approach to international aid and development that has produced sustainable and quantifiable results.

My wife Donna and I are engaged social investors having formed and funded A Glimmer of Hope, an Austin, Texas-based foundation in 2000. A Glimmer of Hope’s purpose is “to provide hope and help to those who suffer unnecessarily from the injustice of poverty” and its focus is on the remote rural poor in Ethiopia.

Over the past eight years we have reached around two million Ethiopians helping to transform their lives in a sustainable and cost effective manner. Today, they have access to clean drinking water, classrooms for their children and healthcare for the sick and we have seen thousands of farmers and women lift themselves out of poverty.

When we visit them in their remote villages, we see transformed communities, healthy people, and children in classrooms. We meet with farmers irrigating their plots of land, turning rock and rubble into fields of green. We talk with the women who took out small loans as start-up capital for their new businesses. We have seen how financial empowerment creates personal empowerment. We see young and old, men and women, boys and girls engaged in improving their lives with hope in their hearts and dreams for the future.

Aid is not dead. The traditional approaches need to be examined with a critical, creative and constructive mind as well as a compassionate heart. The setbacks, disappointments and shortcomings of aid and development need to be understood and then challenged and solved.

Social Investing creates social profit and new and proven approaches have already emerged and been adopted; they are being implemented with great effect, sustainability and impact.

There is hope. Yes we can!

Philip R Berber
Chairman
A Glimmer of Hope
http://www.aglimmerofhope.org/

Please also view.
ONE
http://www.one.org/c/us/hottopic/910/

Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/02/AR2009040203285.html