Best Books on Aid for Africa

Published in the US as The Crisis Caravan, Linda Polman's book is the best read about the pitfalls of humanitarian aid in Africa (and elsewhere). Polman, an Amsterdam-based journalist, has visited and written about several aid destinations in Africa, including Goma, Sierra Leone, and The Sudan. She is unequivocal in her criticism of aid agencies and the way they kowtow to corrupt government forces and militant rebels alike.

This book will make you think about where your tax and charity money is going, and whether agencies involved are working for humanitarian reasons, or their own aggrandizement.

In the UK: War Games by Linda Polman, ISBN-13 978-0-670-91896-6
In the US: The Crisis Caravan by Linda Polman, ISBN-13 978-0-805-09290-5

The book's sub-title, Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good, goes a good way to explaining its premise. Written by William Easterly, a former World Bank Economist and now Professor of Economics at New York University, this excellent book divides aid 'actors' into to groups: Searchers and Planners.

The latter group, which typifies the bureaucrats of the aid industry, are allowed to continue with grandiose plans for ending world poverty and hunger because there is no accountability built into the system, and because they are not amenable to criticism. Easterly's Searchers are aid workers at the front, who look for local solutions and constantly updated approaches to the situation at hand. An outstanding call for the reform of international aid.

In the US: ISBN-13 978-0-14-303882-5
In the UK: ISBN-13 978-0-19-922611-5

The world's poorest people, the Bottom Billion of the title, are found in 50 or so failing states. Most of them are in Africa and, despite trillions of aid being poured into the continent, little has really changed.

Collier, Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University, highlights the causes of aid's failure to help the Bottom Billion. This includes political instability, corruption by governments and rebel forces, complacent facilitation by aid agencies, and excessive redundancy in a system which encourages multiple agencies to chase the same aid goal each with their own social/political agenda. This book is an essential guide to aid in Africa.

In the US: ISBN-13 978-0-19-537338-7
In the UK: ISBN-13 978-0-19-537463-6

Dead Aid makes the startling claim that no aid would be better for Africa than the current system of provision. Moya claims developmental aid from governments and the World Bank (rather than that from charities or in response to humanitarian disasters) is encouraging corruption and creating a dependence culture in Africa. The best, and simplest solution, she suggests, is to cut the aid supply and encourage a market driven response to development.

Moyo, an international economist and former head of Economic Research and Strategy for Sub-Saharan Africa at Goldman Sachs, garnered a great deal of media coverage when her book was first published in 2009. Not least because a Zambian Woman had dared to challenge the old-boy's-club mind-set of aid bureaucracy and celebrity activism. Dead Aid is a refreshing look at the institutional side of the aid circus.

In the US: ISBN-13 978-0-37-453212-3
In the UK: ISBN-13 978-1-846-14006-8

The sub-title Ethiopia since Live Aid explains the raison d'être of this book. Peter Gill describes the last 25 years of Ethiopia, a subject he knows intimately. One of the first journalists to cover the 1984-85 famine, Gill describes how Ethiopia has become the 'poster child' of world hunger. Despite the claims back in the 80s that world poverty could, and would, be eliminated (mostly, it seems, by the messianic activism of a group of 'concerned' pop stars), Gill's book points out that recurring droughts in Ethiopia have not been as devastating to its people as the autocratic approach of its government has been.

Gill may come across as slightly apologetic for Meles Zenawi's policies, a leader who suppressed protest at home whilst serving on UK Prime Minister Blair's Commission of Africa. But this book is one of the few that gives the bigger picture of the interaction of international, and humanitarian, aid with the government of an aid receiving country.

ISBN-13 978-0-19-956984-7

Direct from the pulpit of a celebrity economist surrounded by his pop star and philanthropist disciples (he's even pictured on the back hugging Bono, who wrote the introduction to the book), Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University, offers a range of solutions to world poverty. The book is subtitled How we can make it happen in our lifetime, a claim which truly highlights the 'feel good' subtext of this mix of polemic and travel log (as he jets around the world offering advise to worthy world leaders).

Sachs' solution: a raft of reforms which will fix the world's ills, and an unending supply of readies from the West to fund it. This is a Utopian synthesis, a 'Big Plan', which covers just about everything one could think of that could possibly influence the lot of the world's poorest countries (except, perhaps, holding the governments of such countries to account). A must read book which offers the counter approach to that of Polman, Easterly and Moyo.

In the US: ISBN-13 978-0-14-303658-6
In the UK: ISBN-13 978-0-14-101866-9