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Aid to Africa: a helping hand, or handouts?

Does foreign aid do more harm than good?

That question went unanswered at Monday night’s Munk Debate. In its place was a lively, free-ranging discussion between four world-renowned experts on the subject of foreign aid, the most pressing moral imperative of wealthy nations.

Though strict alliances would eventually give way, Stephen Lewis, former UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa partnered with world-renowned economist Paul Collier on Monday to take on property rights advocate Hernando De Soto and Dambisa Moyo on the question of foreign aid.

As a testament to the complexity of the issue, debaters abandoned their respective Yes and No camps to take stances on the role aid plays in countries seeking to overcome developmental obstacles.

“Aid to Africa has been wantonly abused over the decades,” admitted a pre-empting Stephen Lewis. But Lewis emphasized the need to sustain the practice of foreign aid, at least in the interim, citing many successes on the African continent. There, it has made anti-retroviral drugs easier to access for the millions of people living with HIV/AIDS and contributed to a seven per cent decline poverty on the continent. The rate of malaria deaths has been halved thanks to insecticide-treated bed nets. He also cited the unlikelihood of private foreign investment replacing foreign aid given the current state of global credit markets.

An equally fiery De Soto countered, framing aid as a persistent and pernicious practice. Its structural contradictions, ones that spark conflict, go unnoticed by a prosperous, liberal, “first world” racked with guilt, he said. De Soto likened the approach to Janus, the roman god whose two faces look out in opposite direction. “You’ve produced what Marx called social contradiction,” he said.

For the most part, Collier abided by the arguments put forth in his recent book.

In The Bottom Billion, Collier explores “divergence” whereby the least-developed sixth of the world stagnates as the rest to develop. He attributes this to a wide array of factors, with aid playing a role, albeit minor. “Why did private capital fail to develop Africa? Was it aid’s fault? Of course not aid is not that important.”

Moyo took issue with her former PhD advisor’s characterization of aid.

Arguing that foreign aid fuels corruption, encourages inflation, unmanageable debt-burdens and civil unrest, stifles a nascent export sector, kills entrepreneurship and ultimately disenfranchises the population, Moyo attacked foreign aid as belittling.

“Enough with the handouts. We are trying to be equal partners on the global stage. We do not want sympathy, we do not want pity. We want opportunities,” she said

These were, more or less, the static positions of the debaters, and in their scope and emphasis the possibility of a consensus seemed to appear: a foreign aid system that props up nations indefinitely is neither tenable nor desirable the need for transition, inarguable. Timing, process, logistics-these were things at issue.

In listening to the post-debate conversations, it was readily apparent that to a society largely unaware of the intricacies of international development, whose know of charity, African children, and Bono, but don’t see how they fit together, the night’s event did as much to educate as it did to entertain.

Debating foreign aid, it seems, does no harm and a whole lot of good.

Opening Remarks

Lewis

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De Soto

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Collier

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Moyo

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