About Aid Watch
The Aid Watch blog is a project of New York University's Development Research Institute (DRI). This blog is principally written by William Easterly, author of "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics" and "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good," and Professor of Economics at NYU. It is co-written by Laura Freschi and by occasional guest bloggers. Our work is based on the idea that more aid will reach the poor the more people are watching aid.
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.” - H.L. Mencken
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Recent Posts
- Ghana. 1970.
- Beware the fury of a patient man: Michael Clemens on Millennium Villages
- The leader bias – for example, this blog
- Undercover Economist Goes Public for Randomized Controlled Trials
- Economics tells countries to specialize…including specializing in economics
- Best in Aid: The Grand Prize
- Defending My Homeboy Hayek from Freakonomics
- Worst in Aid: the Grand Prize
Recent Comments
- geckonomist on Beware the fury of a patient man: Michael Clemens on Millennium Villages: nobody needs evaluations to see whether some...
- Joe on Ghana. 1970.: Nice photo. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a wonderful documentary on Ghana from 1950s-1980s:...
- Robert Tulip on Beware the fury of a patient man: Michael Clemens on Millennium Villages: Opportunity cost of MDVs would be clarified by...
- ugo on Economics tells countries to specialize…including specializing in economics: I think that the Paris School of Economics and the...
- Mike on Undercover Economist Goes Public for Randomized Controlled Trials: Agree with Tim Harford
- avam on The leader bias – for example, this blog: I’d like to second everything Androgyne said. completely agree.
Archives
Popular Posts
- 100% African leaders advise Bono on reform of U2
- 84% Nobody wants your old shoes: How not to help in Haiti
- 34% Haiti earthquake: Help navigating complex terrain of disaster relief
- 18% The Civil War in Development Economics
- 16% How to write about poor people
- 15% If Martin Luther King had been an aid official -- the Powerpoint version of I Have a Dream
Bill Easterly Tweets
- Ghana. 1970. Old Picture. http://bit.ly/dtGz96 (T from last night) about 5 minutes ago from bit.ly
- PS location of equinox sunrise in the East this morning showed that Manhattan streets do not really run East-West, they are off by a lot. about 2 hours ago from web
- Only 5 hours to go until beginning of Spring. Expected high in New York today 74F. finally! about 2 hours ago from web
- Ghana. 1970. Old picture. http://bit.ly/dtGz96 about 17 hours ago from bit.ly
Aid Watch tweets
- WB: Graph showing Africa's devt pattern increasingly diverse, w/ more & more success stories via @ryanbriggs http://bit.ly/dsdqPy 11:07:43 AM March 18, 2010 from web
- Today's post: Economics worldwide is an Anglo-Saxon monopoly. Discuss.http://bit.ly/bka5vP 10:58:41 AM March 18, 2010 from web
- RT @nancymbirdsall A new way to deliver aid to Pakistan? @FP_Magazine (http://bit.ly/8Z7av5) cites #CODAid (http://bit.ly/24cpXR) 10:58:07 AM March 18, 2010 from web
- Modest manifesto on open philanthropy http://bit.ly/a8Prsg via @denniswhittle 11:44:41 AM March 17, 2010 from web
Author Archives: Laura Freschi
New UN report says Somali food aid failing to reach the poor (NYT)
Rather than reaching the needy, up to half of Somalia’s food aid ends up in the pockets of radical militants, corrupt bureaucrats and local businessmen, and local UN staff, according to an article in yesterday’s New York Times on the findings of a new UN report.
The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that
…
Paying for school on $2 a day
When James Tooley first discovered low-cost private schools for the poor in urban slums and rural areas in India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and China, aid agency officials and local government administrators did not receive the news warmly.
Most flat out denied that such schools existed. Even if they do exist, said the experts, they can’t possibly be any good. School owners that run for-profit schools in shantytowns and poor villages are just exploiting poor communities.…
Posted in Uncategorized
26 Comments
Religion and Ethics takes on foreign aid
Bill Easterly is featured on PBS’s Religion and Ethics program airing this week. It’s called “Making Foreign Aid Work,” and here’s an excerpt:
Check the Religion and Ethics site for local viewing times.
Posted in Uncategorized
6 Comments
Some NGOs CAN adjust to Failure: The PlayPumps Story
Back in the 1990s, a billboard advertising executive in South Africa had a very good idea. Spinning on a merry-go-round connected to a water pump, children could generate plentiful, clean water without the time-consuming, hard work of traditional hand pumps.
At the primary schools in South Africa where the first of these merry-go-rounds were installed, kids got a place to play, their communities got free drinking water, and girls and women, who bear much of…
Posted in Uncategorized
21 Comments
Four Ways Brain Drain out of Africa is a good thing
Conventional wisdom frets that the exodus of skilled workers—the brain drain—is bad for African countries. The share of Africans with college degrees who live outside their home countries is certainly high: nearly half of Ghanaians, about 40 percent of Kenyans, and about one-third of Ugandans.
The metaphor of the term itself implies that brain drain is a waste, as if all Africa’s most promising minds were being sucked down some global sink, leaving behind a…
Posted in Uncategorized
26 Comments
China in Africa Myths and Realities
In recent years, journalists and pundits in the West have looked on China’s economic engagement with Africa, including foreign aid, with growing alarm. An NYT op-ed a few years ago called China a “rogue donor,“ giving aid that is “nondemocratic in origin and nontransparent in practice, and its effect is typically to stifle real progress while hurting ordinary citizens.”
Other negative stories about China in Africa include China abetting genocide in Darfur by…
Posted in Aid Policies and Approaches
16 Comments
A multiple choice post on Haiti disaster
Which best describes Port-au-Prince?
A) A hotbed of looting, machete-wielding gangs and violence.
“Downtown Port-au-Prince now feels like a war zone. Gangs with machetes rule the streets here.” – CBS News 1/14/2010
“Hundreds of people desperate for food and supplies swarmed downtown Haiti yesterday, climbing atop piles of broken rubble and shards of glass to get to canned goods, powdered milk, and batteries buried underneath. On the main boulevard, the Grand Rue, their desperation flared
…
Posted in Uncategorized
7 Comments
Too much of a good thing? Making the most of your disaster donations
The global outpouring of support for people affected by the South Asia earthquake and tsunamis of 2004 added up to more than $14 billion.
One notable fact about this $14 billion is that it represents the most generous international response to a natural disaster on record. Another is that it exceeded the total estimated cost of damages from the storm by some $4 billion, or about 30 percent.
What drove these record-breaking sums in the…
Posted in Uncategorized
9 Comments
Getting humanitarian relief right
The extent of the devastation in Port-au-Prince, the incapacity of the already weak Haitian government, and the degraded state of infrastructure throughout the country resist comparison to any disaster before this one. But post-recovery evaluations from the Asian tsunami, the Bam earthquake and other disasters suggest which practices allow relief efforts to work effectively and which result in waste and delays.
My piece on Forbes.com puts the response to Haiti’s earthquake in the context of…
Posted in Uncategorized
6 Comments
NYT’s David Brooks on “What Works in Development”
An editorial in the NYT by David Brooks discusses “What Works in Development” (see our previous posts on the book) in the context of explaining why aid has thus far failed to achieve growth in Haiti.
In the recent anthology “What Works in Development?,” a group of economists try to sort out what we’ve learned. The picture is grim. There are no policy levers that consistently correlate to increased growth. There
…
Posted in Uncategorized
6 Comments


