Aid Watch Blog

This post is by Claudia Williamson, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI.

This is a central question of The Aid Trap, by Columbia professors R. Glen Hubbard and William Duggan. Instead of supporting development, the authors argue, aid creates additional hurdles. While aid ‘crowds out or corrupts the business sector,’ we remain caught in an aid trap because business doesn’t pull at the heartstrings the way charity does.

The first half of the book…

I’ve commented previously on Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff’s great book, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, arguing that if financial crises are so common and the world keeps growing anyway, then they must not be so damaging  in the long run. I had been meaning to check what the authors themselves thought of this argument, but am only getting around to it now. Here is my email exchange with Carmen…

Not too many people are aware that Ghana has a very good game park, called Mole National Park, about two hours drive from Tamale in the north, which is in turn a short flight from Accra.

Like many other African governments, Ghana’s government has high hopes for earnings from tourism. Will it happen?

You can sign me up as a zealous booster of Ghana tourism. Mole National Park alone is amazing, as I hope some…

Contrary to the image of African countries as static mono-exporters, it is unpredictable from one period to the next which will be the top exports in each country.

Consider this picture of Tanzania’s top exports in 1998 and 2007.

This is pattern of rapidly changing success is the norm across African countries. If you take the top 100 exports in each country in 1998 (or the first year in which data is available), its…

UPDATE: contrasting negative images offered by commentators on Twitter (see end of post)

My Ghanaian friends often tell me that if you want to understand Ghanaians at all, you have to understand how religious are most Ghanaians. I believed them of course, but it didn’t really become vivid until I attended the most amazing church service this morning. I am not saying this out of any religious motives, just to point out another side of…

My wife and I visited the village of Goyire yesterday, about 30km from Bolgatanga in northern Ghana, home to the Builse subgroup of the Talensi ethnic group. We were looking at a malaria bed nets project that I will discuss more in a future post.  The community had organized a skit to dramatize why bed net utilization is so important to prevent malaria. The amateur community Thespians doing the skit really hammed it up and the…

Greetings Aid Watchers, just back on line, been busy touring remote places in northern Ghana. I’ll be writing up experiences in a future post, but I only have a few minutes right now. One very quick thought I have been having:

Q: what’s the difference between remote northern Ghana and downtown Manhattan?

A: my iPhone gets a signal in remote northern Ghana

Our image of a medieval king is of somebody with hundreds of servants waiting upon His Majesty. Today, for $99, you commoners can get a much larger and better group waiting upon you. You will even have dead servants working for you – (1) Sumerians from 3000 BC (2) Babylonians from 2000 BC, (3) Egyptians from 1850 BC (4) Indians from 500 BC, (5) 7^th century BC Romans, (6) 18^th century Austrian musicians, (7) a…

For those of you who have not yet discovered the wonderful Hans Rosling, go to his Gapminder to discover whole new ways of visualizing development in motion. See the classic hilarious video of his TED talk, or something more recent.

This post was written by Alanna Shaikh. Alanna is a global health professional who blogs at UN Dispatch and Blood and Milk.

We’ve spent the last few years watching the best donors and NGOs get more and more committed to the idea of measurable impacts. At first, the trend seemed unimpeachable. International donors have spent far too much money with far too few results. Focusing more on impact seemed like the way out of that trap.…