VENTURES AFRICA – Zambia-born author and renowned economist Dambisa Moyo, on Thursday reacted to the world’s richest man Bill Gates’ “inappropriate and disrespectful” comments about her and her New York Times bestselling book, Dead Aid.
When asked about his thought on the book during a Q&A session on Tuesday at the University of New South Wales, the Microsoft co-founder said the author “didn’t know much about aid and what it was doing” in Africa, adding that such books promote evil.
Moyo’s book Dead Aid explained why aid is not working in Africa and shed light on the possible solutions to economic prosperity.
She wrote on her blog: “I find it disappointing that Mr. Gates would not only conflate my arguments about structural aid with those about emergency or NGO aid, but also that he would then use this gross misrepresentation of my work to publicly attack my knowledge, background, and value system.”
The former Barrick Gold Director furthered: “I have dedicated many years to economic study up to the PhD level, to analyze and understand the inherent weaknesses of aid, and why aid policies have consistently failed to deliver on economic growth and poverty alleviation. To this, I add my experience working as a consultant at the World Bank, and being born and raised in Zambia, one of the poorest aid-recipients in the world. This first-hand knowledge and experience has highlighted for me the legacy of failures of aid, and provided me with a unique understanding of not only the failures of the aid system but also of the tools for what could bring African economic success.”
Moyo is an author of several books including: How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead and Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World and Dead Aid. In 2009, she was rated on Time 100 most influential person in the world list.
According to her, “Western aid had become like a drug to many African countries,giving them little incentive to develop industry since aid rather than tax was a more reliable source of government revenue. Source
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