Author Archives: Laura Freschi

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

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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.…

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.

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…

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…

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

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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…

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…

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

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