great book - Rated 
this book gives a brilliant, and different insight into the world of development in an informal and interesting way.
Challenges what you believe - Rated 
Easterly does a good job challenging contemporary opinion on how to solve poverty around the book. While the book's title is slightly embarrassing, in a way, it explains the two main themes of the book. Firstly, most of the current attempt to fix the poor world is underpinned by an assumption that the West has a moral burden to help. Secondly, and unfortunately, that attempt fails at the implementation stage because of bureaucracy, arrogance, 'planners vs searchers', and the in situ patronizing and condescending attitude of some Westerners.
Be warned though. It is slightly too long and the statistics can bore you out if all you want is a nice read. Also, by not proffering solutions, Easterly may occasionally appear pessimistic or nonchalant.
The White Man's Burden by Wm Easterley - Rated
A refreshingly frank easy to read book written from decades of "inside" knowledge and experience which should be a bible for anyone involved or interested in releasing Africa's undoubted potential
Taking the poor seriously - Rated
`The White Man's Burden: Why the West's efforts to aid the rest have done so much ill and so little good' poses two fairly simple questions. First of all, how have the rich countries managed to give away $2.3 trillion over the last decades and still see people dying of malnutrition and entirely curable diseases? And secondly, why can the free market deliver millions of copies of a new Harry Potter book to children around the world all on the same day, but can't deliver a life-saving vaccination programme?
His conclusion is that aid has failed, from a mixture of corruption, overambition, and incompetence. He then draws a distinction between `planners', and 'searchers'. Planners are the big thinkers, the `big push' schemes like the Millennnium Development Goals, or Make Poverty History. While the planners get the celebrity endorsements, the best solutions are the ones that are home-grown - small-scale, "effective piecemeal" approaches that start with the poor and work out their needs and how to meet them. These are the 'searchers', who are concerned with what works rather than big and noble ideals.
I didn't expect to agree or to like a book that is so critical of aid, but his critique is balanced with a very real compassion for the poor. Ultimately, he's on their side, and Easterly's belief in small-scale, bottom-up approaches is one that needs to be widely read by policy-makers.
Witty and insightful account of the failure of aid in Africa - Rated
How come $2.3 trillion dollars of Western aid has been spent in the last 50 years mostly in Africa, my native continent, and yet millions of children still die of preventable diseases like dysentery, cholera and malaria? Why have the vast amounts of aid money and Western good intentions not been able to lift Africa out of back-breaking poverty? William Easterly's argument, in this fascinating book, is that Western aid has failed because of the traditional approach that it has taken to tackling Third World poverty: planning and bureaucracy.
According to Mr Easterly, Western aid in the form on the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank and the IMF) is the most recent reincarnation of the White Man's Burden, a phrase which was immortalized by Kipling. The basic argument of the White Man's Burden in the 19th century was that Western Europe spread Christianity, commerce and civilization to the coloured, benighted races of the world (of course for the benefit of the Africans and Asians).
Mr Easterly, a former World Bank Economist, writes that the command-and-control bureaucrats of the aid establishment, whom he dubs as Planners, cannot understand the complexities of getting aid to the desperate poor because:
- There is no accountability for service delivery, as the poor cannot do this by voting.
- Planners' thinking is dominated by grandiose, non-specific plans such as ending poverty and the Millennium Development Goals
- Planners think that they already have the answers. Hence, they tend to be patronizing and have a ready-made answer for every poor country; structural adjustment, free markets and privatization
The author then contrasts the failure of the Planners with Searchers, whom he defines as people who work at the local level seeking incremental economic change for the poor by constantly experimenting with new ideas on the ground. He provides interesting accounts of aid projects, done by Searchers; Westerners and Africans, which were modest in scope but brought significant benefits to the poor. My favourite example was from India. By making a contribution of $5,000, Western donors built a toilet block for teenage girls in a rural school. This dramatically cut the drop-out rate for the girls because, as it turns out, they (the girls) had been dropping out "in droves because of the embarrassment that they felt once they started menstruating and had no private facilities".
He brilliantly shows that Western-style market societies cannot be planned "top-down" (contrary to the goals of the Planners). Markets in the developed West are the result of complex social and political institutions/norms that have taken thousands of years to evolve. Since free market opportunities in the West and The Rest depend on "bottom-up choices" which the planners don't begin to understand, Planners are doomed to fail in creating markets in the Third World.
Though the subject of the book is a serious one, the tome is spiced with witty accounts of the histories of various Third World countries: Western support for UNITA in Angola, the Contras in Nicaragua and in Haiti. On page after page, Easterly provides grim evidence of the failure of the World Bank, the IMF and Western military intervention to bring about desired social change. More often than not, it has led to much harm as in the above-mentioned countries. The message: Economic success in the tropics cannot be planned from an office in Washington DC. Instead, as has happened in Japan, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, China and India, it must be homegrown. Certainly Western aid still has a role to play but the Planners in the World Bank and IMF would do well to be more humble in their ambitions and seek to incrementally the improve lives of individuals in the poor countries.
Sometimes, Mr Easterly's analysis is quite dry. For example, he presents information showing that people in (rich) Denmark are more trustful of each other than people in (poor) The Philippines are. However, he erroneously concludes that wealth is a determinant of trust in a society. Could it be that Danes are more trustful of each other because theirs is a more ethnically homogenous and equal society than The Philippines? Could a breakdown in social institutions in The Philippines be the cause of mistrust, say more than wealth?
The distinction between Planners and Searchers struck me as being too simplistic. It is hard to believe that everyone who works for the World Bank and IMF falls neatly into the "Planner" category. Surely, the truth is more complex than the author presents it. However, since the crude distinction works well in contrasting the traditional approach to aid, I'll not fault the author for this.
Finally, the author presents some ideas for getting aid to work:
- Make aid agencies individually accountable for individual, feasible areas that help poor people improve their lives
- Give aid agencies the opportunity to experiment and search for what works
- Abandon the utopian blueprint to fix the Third World's complex problems. Instead focus on getting specific, incremental improvement in people's lives in fields such as health, sanitation and food security. Broad-brush plans for delivering market economies, `Making Poverty History" or establishing the rule of law, laudable as they are, are going to fail
In the concluding chapter, the author makes a most poignant point: "Aid won't make poverty history...only the self reliant efforts of poor people and poor societies themselves can end poverty, borrowing ideas and institutions from the West when it suits them to do so". It is a message with which I concur and one that I, as a Nigerian, have taken to heart. I recommend White Man's Burden for making such a timely point.
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