A Prospect for Change?

In Chapter 1, I suggested that what was needed to bring the one billion poorest of the poor on to a growth path was radical change. This statement was not a call for revolution but rather to draw a stark contrast with the incrementalism and low expectations associated with the aid industry over 50 years, so low in some cases that one might well think that there was a hidden agenda, to do nothing but appear to be doing something. In the case of some donor nations that see aid simply as an exercise in political influence this surely applies.

In the last chapter, it was suggested that the failures of development aid in the hardcore poor countries cannot be explained by a host of factors that are currently deployed to explain them. These include: the lack of good impact evaluation techniques; the corrupt practices of local civil servants and politicians; the lack of buy-in by government and business to the assistance approach of aid donors; the lack of ownership of these same programs by the recipient “beneficiaries”; the weakness of capacity within government.