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
- Rodrik, Defining Libertarians, Afghan Tribes, Finding Coffee in New York
- The tragic disappearing of humanitarian neutrality
- New UN report says Somali food aid failing to reach the poor (NYT)
- Readers’ Submissions: Honorable Mentions in Best and Worst of Aid
- Am I useless? A critic needs to listen to critics
- New York Times on Millennium Villages
Recent Comments
- jmdesp on In defense of being mean-spirited: response to a critic: « During the war, deliveries of food to the camps by the World Food...
- WP on The tragic disappearing of humanitarian neutrality: Perceptions are certainly important here. Some of the writers here conflate...
- Belay on New UN report says Somali food aid failing to reach the poor (NYT): This is sad. But equally sad is the fact that this blog...
- Agnostic on The tragic disappearing of humanitarian neutrality: The attack was a criminal, horrible, despicable act of violence for which...
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- 100% African leaders advise Bono on reform of U2
- 83% 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
- @CoffeeGourmet have you ever tried the fabulous Tomoca coffee from Ethiopia? about 1 hour ago from webin reply to CoffeeGourmet
- Links: Rodrik over-excited on capital controls, defining libertarians, NYT Afghan tribal analysis, & bonus NYC coffee http://bit.ly/9sOx1A about 3 hours ago from bit.ly
- Update: Evangelical blogs on the aid worker killings in Pakistan http://bit.ly/alyL9i about 21 hours ago from bit.ly
- Free Press => a bit of aid accountability: WFP cuts off Somali bad guys after NYT food aid diversion story http://bit.ly/csTPPG about 21 hours ago from bit.ly
Aid Watch tweets
- RT @USAID_News #Shah's testimony before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Ops http://bit.ly/90XNdt 11:53:17 AM March 04, 2010 from web
- A great, thoughtful post from @patrickmeier: Haiti and the Tyranny of Technology (via @alanna_shaikh, again) http://bit.ly/aV0oYb 12:56:02 PM March 03, 2010 from web
- FP: Refugees International issues striking indictment of UN efforts in Haiti so far http://bit.ly/bPner8 via @cblatts 12:07:02 PM March 03, 2010 from web
- BBC investigation: 1984 Ethiopia famine aid spent on weapons as rebels posed as grain merchants http://bit.ly/aq53Rb 10:59:29 AM March 03, 2010 from web
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Rodrik, Defining Libertarians, Afghan Tribes, Finding Coffee in New York
Links for Friday:
Dani Rodrik gets way too excited about changing IMF views on capital controls.
Will Wilkinson: libertarians are liberals who like markets.
The NYT again tries tribal analysis in Afghanistan: did they get it wrong again?
Bonus non-development link: where to find the best coffee in New York
The tragic disappearing of humanitarian neutrality
From today’s NYT:
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — Six Pakistani employees of the American Christian charity World Vision were killed Wednesday and seven others were wounded in an attack on the aid group’s offices in a remote village in northern Pakistan.
The Seattle Times on the same story:
When suspected extremists armed with assault rifles and a homemade bomb burst into a World Vision office in northwestern Pakistan this week, killing
…
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
…
Readers’ Submissions: Honorable Mentions in Best and Worst of Aid
The Aid Watch request for reader submissions for Best and Worst of Aid was our experimental attempt to use informal social networks to collect and spread stories about good and bad aid projects. In retrospect, it was only a partial success: we got a lot of submissions that couldn’t be totally verified, and many that did not explain why their submission deserved to be the best or the worst, problems for us to think about…
New York Times on Millennium Villages
Jeffrey Gettleman reports today from Sauri, Kenya on the debate on the Millennium Villages.
In defense of being mean-spirited: response to a critic
People on Twitter yesterday and today called attention to this thought-provoking critique of yours truly (from Chris Conrad at his blog The Big-Push: Development and Aid Effectiveness)
I did want to take issue with one of Easterly’s tweets from yesterday, in which he sardonically impugns USAID’s efforts in Afghanistan, suggesting that the most benefit Afghanis have realized from USAID’s years of war-time effort is the use of USAID-labeled vegetable oil cans
…
Do what you’re actually good at? or what you should be good at?
We have just finished the annual ritual in which Hollywood pretends that its job description is making quality indie movies, instead of what it is actually good at — producing crowd-pleasing blockbusters. Avatar was not only in the latter category by $2.5 billion or so and counting, it even got good reviews from critics. But it couldn’t win Best Picture under Hollywood’s hypocritical self-fantasy that rewards what they think they SHOULD be doing.
Wait, I feel another Aid…
Also posted in Aid Policies and Approaches
12 Comments
Who is best qualified to help Haiti? Why not the Haitian diaspora?
Toronto Globe and Mail columist Margaret Wente:
Who can offer the most help to the desperate children of Haiti? Is it Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, the World Bank or the UN? Is it the many experts who are calling for a Marshall Plan to “fix” Haiti once and for all, or the donor nations that have pledged billions for the task?
Personally, I would choose people like Eric and Nicole Pauyo. The Haitian-Canadian
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Afghans and social entrepreneurs improvise when official aid fails
From the blog FabFi (HT to blog Whirled Citizen)
{A} World Bank funded infrastructure project to bring internet connectivity to Afghanistan began more than SEVEN YEARS ago and only made its first international link this June. That project, despite hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, is still far from being complete.
{Meanwhile} the Fabbed Long-Range Wireless Antenna Project, … as of December 2008 is working on an installation
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Live Tweeting from Our “Best and Worst of Aid” Conference
- indabamf Excitedly listening to opening session, Development Research Institute, NYU: Aid & Development Today
- indabamf @bill_easterly notes that lack of transparency & specialization are 2 factors that have made AID less effective than it could be
- indabamf There has been a upward trend to providing AID to corrupt countries
- altmandaniel @bill_easterly gives award for Worst of Aid to Defense/Diplomacy/Development approach of US, UK, Canada
- indabamf Worst of AID Oscar goes
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