At the Exploiting Africa Academy Awards is…
Machine Gun Preacher.
The strange contrast between evil violent African males with the saintly violent white male, who frequently boasts “I am saving African children,” was apparently a clincher for our voting audience.
Following the Academy Award nominations earlier this week, we introduce the Exploiting Africa Academy Award (EAAA) nominations to recognize films who do the best against stiff competition to portray the most insulting and exploitative images of Africans, usually being heroically saved by some white people.
We include links to the trailers.
UPDATE V January 24, 2012: 123 days later, the CAO is on the case
Yesterday we heard from Oxfam that the World Bank has finally announced an independent investigation into complaints from two communities in Uganda who lost their land in forced evictions to make way for forestry plantations.
The Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO) reports directly to the President of the World Bank and examines cases brought by people affected by World Bank private sector lending projects, usually dealing with social and environmental problems.
This announcement comes 123 days after the Bank promised to investigate. Forgive us for being a tiny bit underwhelmed that it took so long to start an investigation that will now take another six months. The CAO’s mandate is to make the Bank more accountable by responding “quickly and effectively” to complaints from affected communities. Allowing 123 days of obfuscation and confusion to pass instead was a disaster for such accountability.
Lack of Rigorous Methodology: Regrettably, this evaluation had to proceed without the required Randomized Controlled Trial on Christmas Gifts, which failed to be completed as planned. Project managers did a poor job explaining the advantages of RCT participation to the Control Group.
Lack of Targeting: The Christmas Gifts aid program was not sufficiently well-targeted to the poor. Recipients of Christmas Gifts indiscriminately included well-off regions, groups, genders, and individuals.
Lack of Efficient Modalities: The Christmas Gifts appeared to consist largely of in-kind aid. This contradicts abundant evidence of best practices emphasizing cash transfers as superior to in-kind aid. There was some evidence of #SWEDOW (“Stuff We Don’t Want”) in-kind transfers, the worst possible kind of aid, usually involving fruitcakes.
Lack of Efficient Timing: Contrary to the recommendation that aid consist of an even, predictable flow, the Christmas Gifts program is mostly concentrated on one day, with a few unpredictable lags ranging from a few days (“late deliveries”) to months (“handmade gifts”).
Lack of Net Flows: Evaluators found Christmas Gift recipients engaged in behavior that frustrated the aid program, with Recipients acting as Donors to their own Donors, reducing their own net aid intake. They explained their counterproductive behavior with non-standard concepts such as “Tis more bless’d to give than to receive.”
Merry Christmas
from the NYU Development Research Institute
Professor Easterly writes for the Guardian Poverty Matters blog on November 21, 2011:
US foreign aid programmes should be for poverty relief and should not be taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building.
As the US government budget wars continue, everyone agrees that among the most vulnerable programmes is foreign aid. What is now forgotten is that foreign aid enjoyed strong bipartisan support until quite recently. On 16 March 2002, President George W Bush announced large funding increases for aid, which have indeed been realised across two administrations since. Even former opponents such as Jesse Helms became aid boosters. What happened to destroy that support?
The answer is that the US aid programme was taken over by national security interests, abetted by delusions of nation-building. The US Agency for International Development (USAid) wound up in the most self-destructive position – the unsuccessful cover-up. USAid arguably had little choice, but development intellectuals and celebrity aid advocates did have a choice – and most chose to stay inexcusably silent during the national security takeover of aid. The resultant failures overshadowed notable successes in more traditional aid programmes like health. These disasters and the neglect of more feasible poverty relief failed to sustain the compassionate constituency evident earlier in the decade. Aid can still be saved politically if it now forswears the undoable nation-building dictated by the defence department, and returns to its original mission of poverty relief – a mission both cheaper and more likely to succeed.
