(by Marvin Olasky, WorldMag.com) — Don Eberly’s The Rise of Global Civil Society (Encounter, 2008) is a book with not one but two subtitles: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up, and Compassion as America’s Most Consequential Export. Those subtitles show what is key in international poverty fighting and how the United States can help.

Eberly rightly scoffs at fashionable top-down programs [run by a central government as opposed to local control]: “Whether the issue is debt relief or increased government expenditures, money is presented as the answer whenever development officials gather. When money is key, the fate of many rests in the hands of a few, namely a handful of leaders from rich industrialized nations.” He notes that “few would contest the evidence that the African continent is mostly worse off today than when foreign aid began pouring in.” One reason is that “aid tends to shift skilled labor from the private sector to the public sector and drastically reduce incentives to produce goods for export.”

Eberly sees the need to pay more attention to issues of “corruption, theft, waste, civil strife, and state failure.” He positively quotes Thomas Dichter, a 40-year veteran of international development efforts, who says that “aid has not worked and is not likely to work in the future and cannot work.” Dichter doesn’t know a single colleague “with long field experience who believes wholeheartedly that aid has been effective.” The problem is that poverty “is not just a material condition-something that is complicated enough-but it is also a matter of the social, cultural, and political position many poor people occupy in their countries.”

Eberly does not suggest neglect, either benign or malign. Instead, he advocates starting with “the one big lesson in foreign aid over the past twenty years on which large majorities of experts and practitioners agree: For aid to be effective, it must be linked to broad reforms aimed at building strong institutions, rules of law, and sound government free of corruption.” Without such reforms, much of the $300 billion in aid from Western nations to Africa since 1980 has merely created a bull market in waste and fraud.

Specific examples are gruesome. The $3.5 billion in aid to Nigeria from 1980 to 2000 (not counting World Bank loans) “is only slightly less than the sum that the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha reported as having been looted during his five-year rule . . . $836 million was poured into projects that were abandoned midway and never completed.” Corruption and fraud, the journal Foreign Affairs concluded, have distorted markets, bred cynicism, undermined the rule of law, and eroded integrity.

Some giving is not destructive, just foolish. Eberly tells of a Peace Corps project to improve chicken production in Morocco by making the Moroccan chicken of choice one that is plumper and more nutritious. Americans brought in Rhode Island Reds, but it soon became evident that no one was buying: Given Moroccan cooking methods, the Rhode Island Reds took four hours to stew and then tasted like mush. The project collapsed.

Is there a way out? Eberly’s fourth chapter, “From Aid Bureaucracy to Civil Society: Participation and Partnership,” is key. Westerners who wish to help can be more effective by finding ways to bring churches, charities, professional and business groups, fraternal organizations and human-rights groups into the process. Instead of working with governments, Westerners need to work directly with those who will integrate altruistic help with the patterns of life shaped by religion and local culture.

Eberly’s last chapter offers more useful recommendations, including: Focus less on charity and more on livelihood enhancement, demand sound governance, promote people-to-people diplomacy. Corporations, Eberly says, should take the lead in international disaster relief, and multilateral institutions such as the United Nations should honestly admit failings. Policymakers should organize a private-sector war on poverty, with each person, club, or church adopting a poor person, country, or poverty-fighting organization.

Copyright ©2009 WORLD Magazine.  Reprinted here September 22nd from the September 26, 2009 issue with permission from World Magazine. Visit the website at WorldMag.com.

Questions

1. What is the purpose of Don Eberly’s book?

2. What does Mr. Eberly see as the problem of top-down (central government controlled) programs?

3. Mr. Eberly quotes Thomas Dichter in his book. Why does Mr. Dichter say that he and other experts in international development efforts do not believe that monetary aid to African governments has been effective?

4. What is the only way aid to poor countries can be effective, according to Mr. Eberly?

5. What effect has the corruption and fraud associated with billions of dollars in aid had on African countries, according to the Journal of Foreign Affairs?

6. List the solutions Mr. Eberly proposes to make foreign aid actually assist the people it is intended to help.

7. Monetary aid to African and other developing countries is viewed by many as compassionate.  Mr. Eberly disagrees.  What do you think of his assertion and proposed solution?  Ask a parent the same question.

Resources

Read a previous article about effective ways to assist people in third world countries rise out of poverty at studentnewsdaily.com/news-issue/the_carnegie_way. (see links to various websites under “Resources”)

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