Duncan Brown
Hope via small business: micro-credit charity founder Vashti Richards with local businesspeople in Nepal
Just how little improvement millions of dollars of aid actually brings to poor countries has vexed policymakers for decades. How can a country like Sierra Leone receive some £50m annually in British aid, yet its healthcare system be so bad that one in six of its mothers still dies in pregnancy or childbirth? Alex Renton’s piece in the forthcoming April issue of Prospect tries to find out—but in the meantime, news of an innovative microfinance scheme called Deki offers hope that things won’t always be this bad.
Microfinance is one of the ways around unscrupulous elites who divert aid into their own coffers. It works by arranging loans for poor businesspeople. The foreign lender makes a contribution of, say, £10 via a local microfinance company, which then administrates the loan and repayment. Interest rates are a lot lower than local moneylenders’ and there’s no shortage of investors.
Deki, though, adds a new incentive by introducing lenders to borrowers via a website where each applicant has a profile picture, accompanied by a short pitch for their business. The lender is free to browse amongst the needy before deciding where their loan will be put to best use. Once it’s done, they can keep track of the improvements their money is making. Like most microfinance schemes, Deki’s local partners only lend to women: research has shown that men are more likely to default.
Oxfam-meets-Dragons’ Den is a strong brew. The scheme may not twang the heartstrings in quite the same way as traditional NGO and charity campaigns—which tend to focus on headline-grabbing privation—do, but using the internet to link the haves with have-nots in mutual interest is an excellent idea. It provides a real incentive to view aid as investment—which is what those millions of dollars need to be if they are ever to have a lasting benefit.
Alex Renton
Rio das Pedras shantytown in Rio de Janeiro: population control is a vital but ignored part of cutting carbon emissions
Here is a proposition. The worst thing that you or I can do for the planet is to have children. If they behave as the average person in the rich world does now, they will emit some 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year of their lives, and they are likely to have more carbon-emitting children who will make an even bigger mess. If Britain is to meet the government’s target of an 80 per cent reduction in our emissions by 2050, we must start reversing our rising population growth immediately.
So why not start cutting population everywhere? Are condoms not the greenest technology of all? The world population is forecast to peak at 9.2bn by 2050; according to environmentalists, if 9.2bn people live as we do today, they’ll need the resources of a second Earth to sustain them. Compared to the pain and expense of the other carbon reduction ideas, population control looks like a winner. Doesn’t it?
A September report by the LSE for the Optimum Population Trust (OPT) suggests that if the world’s “unmet need” for contraception was tackled, there would be half a billion fewer human beings on the planet by 2050, preventing the emission of 34 gigatonnes of carbon. Providing the condoms, or other acceptable methods, would cost just $220m (£138m); the introduction of low-carbon technology to produce an equivalent saving would cost over $1 trillion.
The calculation is simplistic, as is any “fewer people = a greener planet” equation. And it doesn’t argue for population control in the developing world. Ninety-five per cent of the extra population in 2050 will be poor, and the poorer you are, the less carbon you emit. By today’s standards, a cull of Australians would be at least 60 times as productive as one of Bangladeshis.
Nonetheless, it seems obvious that population stabilisation should be intrinsic to any climate-change strategy. Many figures outside NGO-land advocate it, from David Attenborough to Martin Rees, president of the Royal Society. So does Anthony Giddens, who in his book The Politics of Climate Change (2009) writes about “the vital importance of a renewed drive on the part of the international agencies to help bring the [population growth] rate down.”
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Tom Chatfield
Is western aid a gift or a curse for Africa?
In a web-exclusive article for Prospect this week, Kevin Watkins—an expert on international development and aid, and Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Global Economic Governance Programme—looks at Dambisa Moyo’s book Dead Aid and its controversial thesis that western governments should replace their current aid policy for Africa with “a hefty dose of cold-turkey.” What should we make of this radical position?, he asks: “Is it time for Bono and Bob Geldof to stop haranguing rich world leaders for a better deal for Africa? Should Oxfam campaigners be matching under the banner ‘Turn off the Aid Taps Now’?”
The answer, Watkins suggests, is far more complex than Moyo’s analysis allows, most centrally because of Dead Aid’s “failure to explore why past aid has delivered so little.” As he puts it, the fact that aid policies themselves have failed to solve Africa’s problems is as inconclusive a proof of their uselessness as the argument that “fire engines cause fires because you find them near burning houses.” The question of what does and can work is, Watkins argues, a hugely important one for the 21st century to answer when faced by the appalling conditions in which hundreds of millions of Africans live. But simply turning off the taps is no solution. As ever, let us know what you think below.
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