TEDxBrussels - Dambisa Moyo - 11/23/09

um I'm here to talk to a little bit about the realities that are on the ground and the real chance for Africa which is the continent where I come from I'm from Zambia what I would like to do today is really appeal to logic reason and evidence as opposed to emotion I think the the world celebrities politicians policymakers have done an amazing job in the last 50 to 60 years to convince us or to delude all of us into believing that the only way we can approach the Africa question is through pity and looking down on in terms of looking down on the African continent we seem to forget as a global society that there are more poor Chinese people on earth than there are poor Africans there are more poor Indians on earth than they are poor Africans and yet if you think about the way we think about Africa we look at Africa and what I call the Four Horsemen of Africa's apocalypse we focus on war disease poverty and corruption almost nothing good comes out of the African continent and I'm here today to argue that we as a global society must start to look at the Africa question and in particular the issue of aid and how we as a global society are trying to address the issue of poverty in Africa in a much more realistic and sensible lens we have a lot of evidence about what works in terms of creating jobs and creating economic growth let's not forget that China has moved 300 million people out of poverty in our lifetime and we know it wasn't by sitting back and relying on aid and at the same time it's not just China to India it's Russia it's Brazil and even countries like South Africa and Botswana on the African continent have meaningfully put a dent in poverty in our time and yet at the same time we know that there is not a single country on Earth that has relied on aid to the extent that African countries rely on aid today that has reduced poverty and created long-term growth and I'll come back to this point later but let's remember these facts um I'd like to start off by saying that it's very easy for people to categorize them I know this Westerners love this they like to say oh no she's black or he's white and he's Republican oh she's Democrat or he's a pro a door and she's against AIDS and I think that that actually detracts from a lot of the things that we know to be true and where we have a lot of common goals so I think there are three things in particular where we all agree and the first thing that we all agree on is that Africa should not rely on aid forever I think we all look forward to a day where Africa can be an equal partner in the global stage and not rely on aid to the extent that the continent does today and by the way I always give people an option if people feel like they want to see everybody remain in poverty and we remain a dependent you're welcome to put your hands up and we can have that discussion but I think we all agree that we would like to see a time when enough is enough African countries are and Africans are equal partners and does not rely on aid to the extent that it does today the second thing that we all agree on is that African governments have to be front and center on the a on the development agenda for the African continent it doesn't matter if Western policymakers or celebrities or individuals or even African individuals like myself care about economic development if African governments are not on board we cannot expect that the situation will turn itself around and this is critical because somehow people think that we can get development going in Africa without the African governments if we somehow just do good and approach things in in our own way well that's not gonna happen we need to get African governments involved and incentivized to do the right thing the third thing that I believe we agree on I have to confess is actually not my point I stole this from my Minister Sondheim who's the minister of international development in Norway when my book came out earlier in the year I was invited to Norway and I'd never been to Oslo as quite surprised because many of you will be aware I'm sure that no way gives about 1% of its income to aid so I was quite surprised why is Minister inviting me to visit but I've never been to Oslo and I thought you know what what the heck it's a nice trip to go and see what it's like there and I had a fantastic time there and I'm sure people who have spent a lot of time with people from Scandinavia will know that they're very very open they love to have debates and it was absolutely wonderful we had a number of public debates with a number of journalists and that one of the debates MS Minister Sondheim said and I'm paraphrasing but he said in public we have to accept that Aid has contributed to the dysfunctionality of African governments and I almost fell off my seat I was like Minister you're making my case for me and I think this is a critical point that we have to accept that whether we like it or not our good intentions of giving aid to Africa have created dysfunctionality across the continent especially amongst our governments and I must remind you because the second point was that we need government's involved to have an a system of aid that is actually creating government dysfunctionality is problematic I will just add here that the manner of the dysfunctionality that it aid creates obviously varies in the worst case scenario the things like corruption emerge and I'll come back to this point later but even in the best case scenario where we see good government's in Africa receiving a lot of aid there's a situation where African governments are allowed to abdicate their responsibilities and I'm going to come back to this point later because this is the crux of the issue when you go to vote for your presidents or prime ministers the expectation is that those governments will provide you with public goods such as education health care infrastructure and security in Africa those Goods by and large are provided by the international community and that is where the problem emerges because even good governments in Africa are not providing public goods somebody said to me you know actually we should stop wasting our time voting for African governments we should start voting between the Gates Foundation and USAID because they're the ones who are providing the the public goods I mean it was kind of a joke but actually if you think about it that's exactly the political system that many Westerners live under so anyway those are the three things I think we agree on we don't want Africa to be on aid forever we want everything government's to be incentivized to do the right thing and again I think we all have to agree that Aid has contributed to dysfunctionality of the African states I'm gonna spend a little bit of time here just for a minute explaining to you what I mean by aid because this is one of the things that people have wanted to throw tomatoes at me for a lot of people in fact one NGO started a campaign against me saying I was going to kill African babies and that I wanted to to stop helping many millions of African babies that are dying across the continents in fact I think Jeffrey Sachs even said this book has been written by a woman who doesn't have any children in rural Africa I'm assuming he does doesn't either but you know maybe maybe he'd like to tell us something in any case the point here being is that I in the book I basically delineate three types of age there's emergency or humanitarian aid so for example think of Katrina or flood as in Brussels today you might be getting some aid after the floods here think about the the tsunami or what happened in Indonesia not too long ago but the point being that I believe as part of a global community we do have a responsibility to act wherever it may be when that type of a tragedy emerges so my book is not about humanitarian or emergency aid the second type of aid is what I would call NGO or charitable aid and think of this as relatively small amounts of money that we give you know ten dollars to buy a mosquito net in Zambia or you know fifteen dollars to Kenya to send a girl to school I myself am involved in a number of charities and but the fact of the matter is let us not delude ourselves this type of intervention is not going to miraculously make Africa grow at the level of economic growth that it needs to grow to reduce poverty and create jobs by the way I should remind you that over 60% of Africans are under the age of 24 in many countries in Africa over 50% of the populations under the age of 15 so we've got a very very young population we need to create jobs we don't need pity we don't need sympathy we need jobs and here it's really important to remember that yes you can send 10 euros to a child in Ghana and maybe she will go to school but if the economies are not growing fast enough when she graduates she will not be able to get a job this is critical and it's very very important also because a lot of people spend millions billions of dollars each year rallying supports to throw more money into the African continent without really thinking about what the implications are longer-term of creating such a dependency cycle my book is not about NGO or charitable aid that should be the sequel I will probably write a book about that and it's important to also stress that these two types of Age humanitarian aid and NGO aid have problems but the book is not about that the book is specifically about a third type of aid which is the government government aid flows large billion dollars packages that go from not just government's but also the international big international aid agencies estimates of aid going to Africa this year at about a hundred billion dollars a year going over the last few years and projected for this year and let us go back into the 1950s and think about what it was that motivated people to start this whole aid regime it was post World War two Bretton Woods had been established and it was on the back of the success of the Marshall Plan where we had seen the what's his equivalent to about a hundred billion dollars being sent into Europe and used for Reconstruction and Development so people were quite excited they thought gosh if it worked in Europe why should it not work in Africa and I have to confess if I had been a policymaker in the 1950s and 60s I would have been a big supporter of aid because conceptually it made sense we know savings leads to investment needs to growth which is a simple economic but there's no saving why don't we give them aid which should lead to investments which leads to leads growth which should reduce poverty it absolutely makes sense but here we are today about 50 years later and there has been over a trillion dollars of aid sent to Africa that is about $100 for every man woman and child on the planet of Earth today I don't know about other planets but I'm sure we can add those in as well but the point being that growth over time in many African countries has actually declined in fact Paul Collier who I hear I think we'll be hearing from a little bit later talks about Africa shearing off from the rest of the world so the rest of the world is going in one direction Africa is going in a different direction but also look at the poverty statistics in 1970 10 percent of Africans lived on less than a dollar a day today over 70 percent of Africans live on less than a dollar a day something is wrong I do not want to sit around and wait for it to be 90 percent of Africans living on less than a dollar a day the notion that throwing in an additional fifty billion dollars to Africa is somehow miraculously going to move the needle is completely ridiculous so the question then becomes why is it that's such a good idea such great intentions of giving money to African countries actually is fraught with problems why is it that we're seeing higher levels of poverty we're seeing Africa sheer off in terms of growth what is the problem and also with respect to growth the United Nations just in terms of a target has said that we need African African countries to grow at around seven percent a year in order to meaningfully put a dent in poverty the reality is that African countries are growing now for this year it projected IMF projections are more like a 1.9 maybe 2% I'm going to very quickly go through some of the reasons why it doesn't work I'm getting my 4-minute signal over there I'm not going to tell you all of them because I want you to go and buy the book but hopefully this will be a bit of a teaser let's get the most obvious reason why is not working in Africa out of the way which is corruption I think if you went outside right now to Brussels MIDI and asked people why they think age doesn't work most people would say oh corruption I'm not gonna spend a lot of time on this because I think it's it's very clear the fact that there's money going into these countries that has no requirements to for certain behavior means that we know it's often stolen and diverted and used for other projects some of my critics have said oh you know that's an old story well I'm afraid to tell you no it's not my own former presidents embroiled in a scandal of stealing money as we speak same next door in Malawi the president there is that a lot of problems as having stolen allegedly 12 million dollars that was earmarked for hiv/aids the story goes on and on look at Transparency International rankings there's a reason why African countries are consistently at the bottom money is getting stolen things like inflation the debt burden Dutch disease this whole idea of dumping in billions of dollars and causing a strengthening of our domestic currencies which kills off the export sector these are problems that are not dambisa Moyo cooked in her kitchen they're very well established in the literature of development in fact the IMF look at the IMF literature itself you will see that a lot of this discussion about the problems of aid is pretty well documented things like civil war has been written about the fact that the fact that money pools at the state level and you end up with all these fractions people always constantly trying to get rid of the government because there's no other source of capital we don't have big private sectors it should come as no surprise to many people in this room that Africa this year has had four coos already four overthrows of government could eat as my parents said to me recently I said yeah can you imagine they've been four coos this year they said to me so it's only in November they just wait and and I think that's an important point but also remember that in Africa you know in the 1990s had more civil unrest and civil war and civil of failed states than the rest of the world put together there's a reason for this we're not developing the private sector as we would like to see it develop linked again to the aid culture is that there's money coming into this society which means that governments don't need to tax their citizens look at the World Bank doing business around the world survey consistently African governments African countries ranking at the bottom causing causing a lot of problems and not creating entrepreneurship not creating business flows I could go on and on I would just say ignore everything I've said thus far the biggest problem with the ade culture is that it disenfranchises Africans I find it completely ridiculous the number of times you go to these big concerts and everybody's there waving their hands listening to celebrities about Africa we actually elect our presidents you should want to hear from our presidents what the plan is however we've got this absurd situation where you rarely hear from African presidents and Africans are disenfranchised it's virtually impossible for us to hold our governments accountable they spend more time courting and catering the international donor agencies than they do listening to Africans on the ground that is a problem I am getting these sorry we're closed sign which means I have to go but I will just leave you with a quote from a Nigerian friend of mine who said you know why do you think it is that people continue to give aid when we know that aid is such a big problem and it basically boils down to low expectations people don't actually believe that Africans can do it and can achieve economic success and his exact quote was Africa is to development what Mars is to NASA every year they spend the hundreds of millions of dollars doing research and experiments and discussions and surveys but the fact of the matter is nobody believes that we'll ever live in Mars and the fundamental problem is that nobody would ever believe that Africa will succeed thank you very much for your time I appreciate it

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Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2009