Cosmin Posted March 8, 2014 Posted March 8, 2014 Since Melinda and I started the foundation 14 years ago, we've been lucky enough to go see the impact of programs funded by the foundation and donor governments. What we see over time is people living longer, getting healthier, and escaping poverty, partly because of services that aid helped develop and deliver. I worry about the myth that aid doesn't work. It gives political leaders an excuse to try to cut back on it—and that would mean fewer lives are saved, and more time before countries can become self-sufficient. ... One percent of the U.S. budget [for foreign aid] is about $30 billion a year. Of that, roughly $11 billion is spent on health: vaccines, bed nets, family planning, drugs to keep people with HIV alive, and so on. (The other $19 billion goes to things like building schools, roads, and irrigation systems.) ... Malaria deaths have dropped 80 percent in Cambodia since The Global Fund started working there in 2003. The horror stories you hear about—where aid just helps a dictator build a new palace—mostly come from a time when a lot of aid was designed to win allies for the Cold War rather than to improve people's lives. Since that time, all of the actors have gotten much better at measurement. Particularly in health and agriculture, we can validate the outcomes and know the value we're getting per dollar spent. ... Second, the “aid breeds dependency” argument misses all the countries that have graduated from being aid recipients, and focuses only on the most difficult remaining cases. Here is a quick list of former major recipients that have grown so much that they receive hardly any aid today: Botswana, Morocco, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Thailand, Mauritius, Singapore, and Malaysia. South Korea received enormous amounts of aid after the Korean War, and is now a net donor. China is also a net aid donor and funds a lot of science to help developing countries. India receives 0.09 percent of its GDP in aid, down from 1 percent in 1991. ... “A vaccination campaign in southern Africa virtually eliminated measles as a killer of children.” “An international effort eradicated smallpox worldwide.” “A program to control tuberculosis in China cut the number of cases by 40 percent between 1990 and 2000.” “A regional program to eliminate polio in Latin America after 1985 has eliminated it as a public health threat in the Americas.” http://annualletter.gatesfoundation.org/?cid=bg_fb_po0_012103/#section=myth-two
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