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Journalism of Courage
Poor people the destitute,disease ridden and malnourished bottom billion live in poor countries. That has been the central operating assumption of the aid business for a decade.
The thesis was true in 1990: then,over 90 per cent of the worlds poor lived in the worlds poorest places. But it looks out of date now. Andy Sumner of Britains Institute of Development Studies reckons that almost three-quarters of the 1.3 billion-odd people existing below the 1.25 a day poverty line now live in middle-income countries. Only a quarter live in the poorest states mostly in Africa.
In one sense it hardly matters to a destitute Nigerian or Indian that his country has been reclassified by some distant development bank. But it raises hard questions about whether foreign aid should be for poor people or poor countries. Britain,for example,has a rule that 90 per cent of aid is supposed to go to the poorest countries. Aid charities strongly support that focus. The result,as taxpayers money runs scarce,is that donors have consigned programmes in middle-income countries to a bonfire says Alex Evans,a former adviser at Britains Department for International Development. Yet these are the countries where the vast majority of the poor live.
On September 29th,Bob Zoellick of the World Bank called for a profound change in how we conduct development research. President Barack Obama wants a rethink of Americas muddled aid programme. Mr Sumners data make that look overdue. Poverty,he says,may be turning from being an international distribution problem into a national one. Most middle-income countries,through national conditional-cash-transfer schemes such as Brazils Bolsa Família,have proved better at helping their own poor than anything invented and financed by the international aid industry. Giving is easy. Thinking can be a lot harder.
The Economist Newspaper Limited 2010
