[rsj_hn]

I think you should revisit the history of US (and Western more generally, but the US is the ringleader) NGO and development activity in Africa. I think a case can be made that it has done more harm than good, and I say this knowing full well all the hospitals and schools founded and staffed by various Christian organizations in the 19th and 20th Centuries as well as the activities of the high powered organizations such as the Ford foundation trying to spread liberal values and western-authored constitutions and legal systems throughout Africa, starting in the post-war period until the present.

IMO we should pull the NGOs out and let African nations find their own path forward. The reason why I think this is to look a little more closely at what aid means and how it works.

There are two types of aid:

1. Direct resources. This is the old model of sending in missionaries to start a hospital or university. This can be helpful in some sense but also the aid workers bring their own values with them and evangelize those values, which is something that may not be suitable for Africa. They end up being local power centers on the ground and start managing and administering African governments instead of letting Africans do that. That was one approach used by the Ford foundation to control african governments and guide them into adopting inappopriate governmental structures.

2. Financial aid. Sending dollars to Africa results in those dollars in Swiss bank accounts of local warlords together with an increase in imports which can displace local production.

Trade with Africa is great, but the moment you start giving them aid, that aid comes with strings and we start pressuring Africa to adopt western european standards and structures, which end up creating fragile governments, they stoke ethnic conflict, and they may well impede letting Africa take its own development path and forming its governments according to its own values.

[dtx1]

While I disagree with your conclusion due to the measurable increases in human development through our aid, i am somewhat sympathetic to your argument on a philosophical level. That being said, most of the HN Crowd would still cry over the opression from our trade with africa in that scenario because its always the evil capitalist west thats at fault and any disagreement on that point and you are considered a goat fucker (see comments above)

[rsj_hn]

> While I disagree with your conclusion due to the measurable increases in human development through our aid

From 1960 to 2020, real GDP per capita in subsaharan Africa has grown by 0.6% per annum.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDSSF

Whereas real global GDP per capita has increased by 1.7%, or three times the rate of growth as subsaharan Africa.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYGDPPCAPKDWLD

So yes, there has been some measurable human development. But Africa continues to fall farther behind the rest of the world -- e.g. the difference in global development between the rest of the world and Africa in 1960 was much lower than the difference today. We see divergence, not convergence.

I can't see that as a success story.

[dtx1]

Well GDP is not the only measure of human development, for example child mortality has more than halved since the 1990s https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT?locations=Z...

I'd call that a sucess story.

[rsj_hn]

That's a very low bar in exchange for Africa continuing to fall farther behind the rest of the world - e.g. during the same period child mortality in the EU fell be a factor of three and in the entire world it declined by a factor of 2.5

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.DYN.MORT?locations=Z...