Reading William Easterly�s The White Man�s Burden: Why the West�s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (2006)

By Getachew Mequanent 

Stories of poor people going hungry, AIDS victims dying of agonizing death, destitute urban children foraging on garbage containers for food, ecosystems destroyed, people displaced by famine and conflicts, and so on, create a lot of emotions in the West. And people from all walks of life give money generously to support aid programs. But, in his The White Man�s Burden: Why the West�s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, William Easterly argues that aid programs have not done anything good. One may or many not agree with him, but he makes an interesting argument. 

As you know, when vocal Ethiopian Diaspora groups called on donors, following the 2005 post-election crisis, to cut aid to Ethiopia, we children of the poor spoke against these well-organized groups (right now they have disintegrated and fight each other). We know that foreign aid has contributed to the progresses made in Ethiopia in recent years, and more importantly, it has saved the lives of millions of our relatives during recurring droughts and famines. But, this is not why I read Easterly�s book - my interest is professional. In fact, I was prompted to read the book by a conversation I had with a colleague of mine one Friday afternoon several weeks ago, during which we became suddenly drawn to William Easterly vs Jeffrey Sachs debate; then I knew Easterly only through media articles and commentaries. 

This piece, which will be the last coming out of my Winter reading of literature, is intended to share Easterly�s thoughts on foreign aid, as well as continue to build our efforts of using opportunities made possible by the internet media to transfer knowledge not only for students and aspiring scholars, but also for government officials who must conduct aid business at international levels. I have created a section at the end to address a personal remark that is specific to my role in the Ethiopian Diaspora debate.

William Easterly is a former World Bank economist and currently a professor at New York University. He earned a reputation as an alternative voice in the donor community when he spoke against Jeffrey Sachs who was tasked by the former UN Secretary-General Koffi Anan to advise the UN on its global development agenda or known as the millennium development project. Easterly is not against a global agenda. He says that he is only seriously opposed to the way things are done: formulating big plans full of rhetoric and unrealistic expectations. He is particularly preoccupied with Sachs� The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (2005) that advocates a �big-push� approach to development, a sort of Marshal Plan that would allow developing countries to get sufficient donor aid necessary to jump-start the development process. He asks, what happened to the $2.3 trillion (or $2,300 billion) of donor money spent in the past five decades? If aid works, why do incidents of poverty continue to increase across the globe? These issues are not the concern of scholars only. They are also the concern of ordinary people, Western taxpayers. 

So Easterly devotes 11 chapters (436 pages) to explain why aid has failed to help poor societies; why it cannot be considered as a precondition for achieving economic growth; and, if aid is considered, why aid agencies should be promoting homegrown solutions. The book is easy to read and the material full of practical examples and illustrations. Aware of the complexities of international development issues, Easterly does not recommend anything concrete, stating instead �the right plan is to have no plan (p. 5)�. In fact, nothing can be done without any kind of planning; what he meant is that outsiders should not go to developing countries with big plans full of theoretical illustrations of a hypothetical world of �development� or what he calls �utopian expectations�. One also appreciates Easterly for preferring to advance genuine discussions of practical development policy and planning issues (instead of ideological posturing, for example), while persisting to remind and caution us of the limitations of his analysis (avoiding generalizations). True, the �third world� is one of the most researched and debated subject areas by scholars and practitioners, and for this reason, one can argue that there is nothing new in what Easterly says. His contribution rather lies in helping us to understand how the whole international aid business works, and more importantly, in the timeliness of his advocacy of alternative, bottom-up development approaches at a time when the business of development planning is dominated by states, and so at a time when the once popular concepts like community development, bottom-up planning and small-scale development are disappearing from the development vocabulary. My piece here, which is intended for virtual Ethiopian audience, is not a criticism of Easterly. It will rather focus on expanding some aspects of this interesting book and discussing them from different perspectives. As you will see later, I do not completely agree with Easterly�s assertion that aid has completely failed to help poor societies and that market mechanisms and incremental planning can be more viable in ensuring the appropriate use of aid resources and promoting economic growth and societal transformation. 

Western foreign aid was never evenly distributed, since aid priorities were defined using non-developmental criteria such as geopolitics. For example, according to the Christian Science Monitor (April 12, 2004 edition), Egypt became the second largest recipient of American aid next to Israel, worth over US $50 billion since 1975. Combined with aid from other bilateral and multilateral agencies, clearly Egypt has been the major beneficiaries of African aid. Nonetheless, Easterly looks at issues more globally and he explains the failure of aid as follows, among other things:

- Planners of aid agencies do not know what they are doing. They have this �utopian fantasy� of changing the Rest (poor countries), believing that �development� is a white man�s responsibility (burden). Instead of working with real beneficiaries and social and institutional agents � Easterly calls them Searchers -, these bureaucrats waste time and resources writing plans and going around meetings and conferences to talk about them. You will be surprised to know that a development plan for a developing country can be reviewed by two dozens of international agencies before it is accepted and approved by the World Bank and IMF. 
- Donor countries simply count the money that they spent and do not monitor and measure results. Because their planners are arrogant and paternalistic, they do not seek feedback from beneficiaries. Nor are they held accountable.
- Aid is given to bad governments that do not use it for goods and services that benefit the poor. 
- At times donors make a mockery of �development expertise� by assigning inexperienced people on projects, such as a 20-years old American tasked to launch an Iraqi stock exchange or another 21-years old American assigned to assist Iraqi security forces in financial management. 
- Donor aid priorities were defined using non-developmental criteria, such as geopolitics and historical associations (e.g. colonialism). In this instance, for example, the IMF keeps lending money to a country that has no real macroeconomic policy goals or a country that is an American ally, even though that country has a difficulty of repaying its previous loans.
- Donors have different policy agenda to which aid recipient countries must agree. At times the priorities of donor countries contradict with each other. A hypothetical example (my own) will be in the 1980s when Canadians were funding a project in Nicaragua that got destroyed by Contra rebels supported by Americans.
- The Cold War did not create conducive environments for development. For example, ideological rivalries incited inter- and intra-civil conflicts that destroyed economies and weakened states. 
- Political and economic reform measures were imposed from outside so that there were no attempts to consider �home grown� solutions. 
- The list can go on. 

I have already pointed out that I intend to address only some aspects of Easterly�s extensive argument. To start with, one agrees with Easterly that foreign aid is not a precondition for development. He provides good data showing that developing countries were developing in their own paces and that things started to go wrong (economic downturns) in the 1980s when the World Bank and IMF began imposing inappropriate structural adjustment programs that promoted wrong economic reform strategies. Nonetheless, under the right conditions, such as the existence of good government and adequate country capacity (manpower and physical infrastructures, for example), aid can help to increase economic growth and promote societal transformation. And Easterly does not oppose the practice of planning aid programs. In fact, he praises UN and other agencies that have planned and implemented successful global social development initiatives, especially in the health sector. However, he believes that, instead of big plans that contain theoretical descriptions of what should be done, incremental, flexible, adaptable bottom-up approaches that are adopted by Searchers (individuals and social, institutional and market agents) are effective in seeking and promoting appropriate strategies of poverty reduction. He writes, 

Searchers can all look for piecemeal, gradual improvements in the lives of the poor, in the working of foreign aid, in the working of private markets, and in the actions of Western governments that affect the Rest�.[They] let their voices be heard when it [aid] doesn�t deliver the goods�[or] gradually figure out how the poor can give more feedback to more accountable agents on what they know and what they most want and need. The big Plans and utopian dreams just get in the way, wasting scarce energies. Can�t the Searchers just look for how the agents of charity can get twelve-cents medicine to children to keep them from dying of malaria, can get four-dollar bet nets to the poor to prevent malaria, can get three dollars to each new mother to prevent child deaths, can get Amaretch into school (p. 30) (emphasis original).

Amaretch is a poor girl who Easterly met outside of Addis Ababa and she is mentioned in the book a few times.

Easterly tells us that the story of free market economy or wealth creation is the story of how ordinary people started small, some inspiring others while others working to better themselves, prosper, expand and build commercial empires, transforming societies all the way. This has actually happened in many countries like China, Japan, India, Turkey, Chile, Botswana, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand, Mauritius and Malaysia. He writes, �the great bulk of development success in the Rest comes from self-reliant, exploratory efforts, and the borrowing of ideas, institutions, and technology from the West when it suits the Rest to do so�. These �success stories [however] do not give any simple blueprint for imitation. Their main unifying theme is that all of them subjected their development searching to a market test, using a combination of domestic and export markets. Using the market for feedback and accountability seems to be necessary for success (p. 363)�. 

If you have been following my discussion of the role of developmental state (aigaforum.com and Ethiopiafirst.com), you would be aware that many attribute the success of China, South Korea, Singapore and other countries mentioned by Easterly to successful state-guided development, rather than markets. It then follows that effective governments can indeed implement development plans effectively or that they are also capable of making effective use of foreign aid. For example, in the past decade and half, Ethiopia has built and maintained thousands of kilometres of gravel and paved roads, 20 universities, hundreds of training centres and trained tens of thousands of school teachers and health workers, all because of the help of foreign aid. Ethiopia is also an example of a country that refused, during structural adjustment negotiations, to compromise certain public policies issues such as privatization of rural land and publicly owned enterprises. 

One recognizes the role of markets in economic growth and societal transformation � core in Easterly�s book. Equally important is to recognize their limitations. To illustrate, a farmer always uses family labour to produce food crops. His son ventures to the city to open a retail store and employs members of his kin. At some point in time, however, he realizes that productivity is low because his relatives are not working hard. So he gives them more incentives (better wages) so that they can be more productive. But then, he realizes that he may as well use performance criteria to recruit and hire more productive workers in the labour market. This is how, to use Easterly�s own words, markets evolve from within by transforming �social norms, networks and relationships�. Yet, the process (i.e., how long it takes markets to evolve) takes time. Government intervention, done properly, helps to increase the productive capacity of private firms, thereby also expanding employment opportunities for the millions of unemployed people. More importantly, markets do not go beyond the production and delivery of goods and services to initiate fundamental social and institutional reforms necessary to pave ways for processes of social and economic development. For example, in Ethiopia, young girls like Amaretch could have been married early had the government not passed a law prohibiting child marriages; it would have taken a decade or decades for the market to create a new social order that respects the rights of Ethiopia�s children. 

Incrementalism � another issue core in Easterly�s book - may mean planning small or big, but it is clearly distinguishable from other planning models by its emphasis on taking small, adaptive steps to implement policies, programs or projects. I myself have observed small-scale aid initiatives impacting on the lives of people. The challenge is how to replicate them so that they can bring about large-scale impact. For example, if you have a model farmer and would like him to be an example for other farmers, you must make sure that those farmers are provided with the same level of support (for example, training and complementary incentives); otherwise, they will not be able to copy from the model farmer. Or, if you want to copy the example of Chinese leaders who embraced changes introduced by local farmers � one of Easterly�s examples of bottom-up changes -, you must put committed and visionary leaders on power. Another example (provided by Easterly) is the �cash for education� program that pays parents to allow girls to go to school. Such initiatives are effective in delivering money directly to poor people and they have indeed worked in Bangladesh or Mexico, according to him. Yet consider a situation where every parent in one region of Ethiopia gets interested in this program. You will be faced with the problem of raising enough money (due to a high number of applicants) and then you must develop a selection criteria (since you are not able to give out cash to every parent), selection process, and so son, with the result that you end up bureaucratizing a system that is very simple. And, given that aid is a temporary phenomenon, what happens if the money stops flowing? I recently met parents (farmers) in Gondar, Northern Ethiopia, who complained that, with all the children going to school, they were experiencing labour shortages. Without technologies that substitute for children�s labour, their exit from rural (farm) labour market can have a tremendous economic impact. These are obvious examples that evidence the complex and many-sided processes of development. And perhaps they do not necessarily contradict Easterly. He in fact pointed out beforehand (p. 5) that �the right plan is to have no plan�, so that Searchers will not be constrained by planning thinking, approaches, frameworks, methodologies, models, and so on, from seeking solutions that are situational appropriate. 

India is an example of a country that is still fighting its way out of poverty. However, the success has not come so easily. Indians struggled for decades, since independence, before the economy took off in the 1990s. Ethiopia (ruled under a reactionary feudal monarchy and later military dictator) lost decades of opportunity to develop. Should Ethiopian leaders follow the example of Indians (assuming that Ethiopia will be able to achieve the same level of growth at the same time as that of India) or they use the opportunity to access international assistance and speed up the process of economic growth? They should make use of international assistance. In this respect, Jeffrey Sachs has made an effort to persuade donors to increase aid. His proposal for a big-push approach may not be realistic, but it is important. If fact, if you are familiar with the literature on planning, you would realize that the difference between Easterly and Sachs is actually rooted in the long historical debate of comprehensive rational planning (doing many things at once) vs incremental planning (doing things incrementally). Otherwise, as far as addressing the needs of the poor is concerned, both of them are concerned with the same thing. This is what Easterly says (p. 368):

�get the poorest people in the world such obvious goods as the vaccines, the antibiotics, the food supplements, the improved seeds, the fertilizer, the roads, the boreholes, the water pipes, the text books, and the nurses. This is not making the poor dependent on handouts; it is giving the poorest people the health, nutrition, education, and other inputs that raise the payoff to their own efforts to better their lives.

And this is what Sachs says (interview with Mother Jones Magazine, March 6, 2005): 

If you have a clinic but you don't have safe drinking water, or if you have safe drinking water and a clinic, but you don't have bed nets to fight malaria, you just don't get the kind of needs met and the basic quality of life that gives you a chance. I think that Bill [William] Easterly misunderstands what I propose. I'm not proposing a single global plan dictated by some UN central command. Quite the opposite, I'm proposing that we help people help themselves. This can be done without legions of people rushing over to these countries to build houses and schools. This is what people in their own communities can do if we give them the resources to do. 

Foreign aid management is a complex business (Easterly devotes two chapter to show this). You can�t just go to a country with resources to open projects. You must deal with a sovereign government bearing in mind international laws, donor policy and political priorities, and so on. You may prefer to engage with a bad government (hoping that it will change its behaviour) instead of disengagement. You also hope that voters will throw bad politicians out of power, although, as Easterly recognizes, this does not ensure that the new ruling elites will be better. Yet, one must not generalize. In Africa, for example, there are countries such as Ghana, Tanzania, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Senegal and Mali which donors like to call �high impact� countries � they use aid money to invest in education, food security and health sectors. Although PRSP (poverty reduction strategy paper) processes have often been criticized for being state-led, they have sensitized bureaucrats and politicians on civil society participation. The African Peer Review Mechanism is not effective and there are in fact more critics than supporters. But it is a start and we must appreciate it. Equally important is to appreciate donors� evolving practices such as those that draw their inspirations from the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness: promotion of developing country-ownership of the development processes; alignments of donors� support with developing countries� strategies, priorities, institutional systems and procedures; harmonization of aid programs; managing for results; and mutual accountability and transparency in the use of aid resources. While Easterly is aware of these developments, he does not appear to appreciate them enough. 

To conclude, Easterly isn�t really talking about the �ills� of aid, as the title of his book suggests. He is talking about the problems of aid management. As I read the book, I kept remembering a man who was the president of the Canadian International Development Agency in the 1970s, speaking at a conference, angrily asking, �why did we fail the world�s poor children?� Having spent sixteen years at the World Bank, Easterly�s writing style combines both passion and experiences of frustration, as you can see from this quotation (p. 368) telling donors what to do: 

Discard your patronizing confidence that you know how to solve other people�s problems better than they do. Don�t try to fix governments or societies. Don�t invade other countries or send armies to one of the brutal armies in a civil war. End conditionality. Stop wasting our time with summits and frameworks. Give up on sweeping and na�ve institutional reform schemes. 

And we thank professor Easterly for this.
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In a sense, this part can be related to the preceding discussion, but the approach is more personalized. I have continued to speak in favor of effective government and competent national leadership including warning my compatriots to be strategic in how they think and advocate political change in present day Ethiopia. Governing a country is not easy, as I have come to learn since I began working in the public administration domain to earn a livelihood. But, it seems that some people have taken this to mean support for the ruling party, EPRDF, to the extent that Tecola Hagos alleged that I have been instrumental in encouraging the starting of a campaign to mobilize support for Prime Minister Meles Zenawi (so that he can stay in power). Tecola even wrote that what I did was as �treasonous as the actions of the original traitor [Meles]�. I regret that Tecola did not choose the right words. Nonetheless, I would like to set the record straight here. I like Meles because he is smart and hard working. I don�t give a damn about his personality. He was not my employer. I do not know him personally. I have no affiliation with his party. He and the current ruling elites have managed to deliver health, education and agricultural services to our poor relatives, compared with the previous elites (today�s �democrats�) who only took care of their off springs and extended families in Addis Ababa (did Tecola say Meles was traitor?). As much as I appreciate professor Tecola�s honesty and openness, I don�t share his views. Nor do I tolerate his �I am always right� attitude. Tecola can do well by focusing his energy on more practical issues such as poverty and economic development.

Having said all this, assume that Tecola has asked me to provide him with possible options for consideration on the future of Ethiopian politics. There are three options: 

Option 1: retain the status quo. Having ruled for 17 year, EPRDF possesses organizational capital (discipline, internal cohesion, resources, so on) and governance experience (though less so in politics), and more importantly, EPRDF leaders have a good development vision and remain committed to helping the poor.

Option 2: consider the opposition. There are now different opposition parties which represent new faces in Ethiopian politics. But they remain divided and unable to demonstrate national leadership. This creates uncertainty about their capacity to govern the country. 

Option 3: consider creating a new political party. This will re-energize the political spirit of Ethiopians. But it takes time to create and build a new party. Governance experience cannot be acquired overnight. 

My choice is obvious. I would be interested in knowing which option Tecola chooses. Thank you very much.



Getachew Mequanent
Ottawa, Canada
April 2008