Supermodel vows to stay naked till USAID funds reach starving children

Supermodel Miranda Kerr posed nude on the cover of Rolling Stone, announcing she would not put her clothes back on until USAID funds reached starving children affected by the drought in East Africa. She criticized USAID for tying aid to purchases from American farmers and shipping companies, leading to delays of many months in food reaching famine victims, causing thousands of premature deaths. Oh, we can only dream. Sorry, this post is fake. The cover is genuine, but Miranda Kerr was actually trying to save the koala bear and said nothing about staying naked, USAID, aid tying, or the drought. I am experimenting with this (fake) blog post /Tweet to see what would work on blogs and Twitter to promote the Aid Watch motto, “just asking that aid benefit the poor.” Based on my Twitter experience, the main ingredients behind how much Tweets “succeed” in the philanthropy area seems to be some combination of two or more of the following: (1) Sex, (2) Celebrities, (3) Outrage (moral), (4) Suffering Africans, and (5) Satire (lame attempt to come up with memorable acronym for (1) thru (6): SCOSAS).

One inspiration for this search for success was Chris Blattman’s hilarious spoof of a UN sex guide, which I tweeted and retweeted over and over again this weekend. It became the biggest hit that I’ve ever tweeted on Twitter. This only featured sex and satire (of the UN), but Chris was so comic that was more than enough. Another big hit in my Twitter career of 3 months was tweeting a post by Alanna Shaikh protesting an AIDS advocacy ad that portrayed the naked female body as the home for the disease.

The biggest hits among tweets of Aid Watch posts: (1) Beyonce’s Secret for Greater Aid Effectiveness, (2) Satire on how to make an Advocacy Video about Africa, (3) Should starving people be tourist attractions? (4) "Didn't we try that in 1938? Why technical poverty fixes fall short?", (5) The tragedy of the Millennium Development Goals, (6) UN Human Rights and Wrongs. It’s based on this record that I came up with the SCOSAS list for Twitter success above.

Of course, it also helps to contrast with what was NOT successful. There was an anemic response to my tweets on NTYT column on getting out of Afghanistan, and Marginal Revolution on how African infant mortality and illiteracy look good in historical perspective. Tweets also fell flat on Aid Watch posts on (1) USAID funding Iraqi insurgents (2) MCC’s admirable openness to their critics, (3) mission creep at the IMF, (4) corruption killing USAID projects in Afghanistan. The Aid Watch post on aid tying appeared before I started Twitter, but also generated a fairly modest response. It’s striking how serious and important these posts are compared to the successful ones on Twitter. Outrage by itself (1) and (4) does not seem to be enough. (We also may have just done a bad job presenting the issues on these posts.) Of course, the successful tweets also covered serious issues, but needed extra SCOSAS pizzazz.

I can understand why my critics at Bill Easterly Watch (!?) justify relying on Angelina Jolie as aid spokeswoman, since she combines all the successful elements. But my big worry at Aid Watch is that relying on shallow sexy celebs to promote aid leads to a shallow aid message: just spend more aid dollars with no incentives for dollars to reach the poor.

Is there some way to grab attention for good causes without selling out to our society's worship of celebrity & sex?

In Which MSF Follows Our Fake Principles from Our Satirical Advocacy Video Guide

When we wrote a satirical guide to making advocacy videos about Africa, we didn't expect anyone to actually make a video using some of our (fake) principles! But the people at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) UK apparently did so, with their new controversial cinema ad campaign, entitled "Boy."* In the new ad, the camera is locked on a single shot: a concrete, bullet-ridden hut, with the graffiti images of war, the front door left open. We are somewhere in Africa. The only movement is the rustling of a plastic bag in the foreground and black smoke billowing from somewhere behind the building. The one-minute soundtrack, from start to finish, is a child desperately crying. The messages which appear slowly on the screen give a horrible meaning to the cries:

One of our doctors is treating a 5-year-old boy/

Militia have just raped his two sisters/

Then clubbed his parents to death /

We can’t operate without your help/

Visit msf.org.uk

You can see the ad here.

Once you recover from the punch to the gut, you note this ad is powerful and well-executed. This is no surprise since it was created by McCann Erikson, the ad firm that brought us "I'd like the teach the world to sing" and "There are some things money can't buy. For everything else, there's MasterCard."

The second thing that struck me is that there are no details, no information on whether this is the story of any one particular child, or which specific conflict has orphaned this boy. In the absence of detail, this “no place” becomes “every place” in Africa, the terrifying Dark Continent.

After watching this ad several times (I don't recommend you try this), I feel 1) deranged and 2) hopeless, as though nothing I could ever do, much less donate a few dollars to MSF, could possibly have any effect on the vast, incomprehensible suffering in the world.

I also don't learn much from this video about the work that MSF does other than that they operate on helpless children in horrific circumstances and need our money. What is the goal of the video? If bad videos are justified by effectiveness, then how is it measured?

I asked the head of communications at MSF UK, Polly Markandya.

She told me that the ad was not intended as a direct fundraising campaign—they deliberately avoided listing a telephone number on screen. Rather, the idea was to “try and raise awareness among a general public audience of the kinds of situations and atrocities which we witness daily in our work and which are so easily ignored by people living comfortable lives in the UK.” MSF is gauging the impact by visits to their website.

Another video on their website, called “Make Your Mark” is more informative and less emotionally manipulative than “Boy.” But, given its more conventional style, it probably hasn’t attracted nearly as much publicity. After all, we haven’t just devoted an entire blog post to that one. But was all the attention really worth such an exploitative video?

*Thanks to Twitterer @IdealistNYC for pointing us to this video.

**This video has recently stirred up a fair amount of controversy in the UK, which you can follow on these blogs.

How to Make an Advocacy Video about Africa, Take II

Dear Readers, Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Reasonable people may argue that if Emmanuelle Chriqui sucking on a Popsicle is what it takes to make some people care that there is a country called the Democratic Republic of Congo, then, well, that’s a good thing. And if Nicole Ritchie babbling nonsense about mothers eating their babies increases attention to Darfur, that’s a good thing too. I’m not so sure.

When these videos “educate” Americans that Africa is a boiling mess of rape, starvation, and war, we get people who believe that Africans are only able to survive thanks to OUR aid, so we must “save” them. As we’ve debated on this blog before, this can lead to the support of wrong-headed policies that could have a real impact (a bad one) on real people’s lives.

And when we reassure people that they are “making a difference” by performing the most mundane, irrelevant of tasks (like buying a coffee, clicking a link, or sending a text) we squander the finite time people have for learning about people they will never meet in places they will never visit. We absolve them of the responsibility and hard work it takes to educate themselves about the world around them and do something constructive (like be an Aid Watcher!).

As for real suggestions: Don’t let my inability to come up with the miraculous recipe for the perfect advocacy video serve as an excuse to stop criticizing what is blatantly bad right now. As we keep saying on this blog, stopping something that is harmful is still positive change. Figuring out how to educate disaffected or uninformed people and get them to act is a difficult problem, and it needs a lot more than a blog post’s worth of time to solve.

So while I don’t claim to have the definitive list, I will venture a few preliminary suggestions. Honestly, these strike me as a little thin and in some cases fairly obvious, but again the examples of bad practices I cited in the original post would suggest otherwise. Please do draw on your expertise to add thoughts and other suggestions in the comments (as well as any examples you think are praiseworthy) and maybe we can come up with some workable principles.

1. It’s okay to assume that people know nothing about your cause. But it’s not okay to use this as an excuse to pander to the lowest common denominator, like sex or celebrity worship.

2. Don’t exaggerate numbers to attract more attention. This throws any claim of credibility and objectivity you might have into question. Do use accurate numbers to convey the scale and importance of your cause. Be as specific as possible in the limited time about exactly where, why, and when the crisis is occurring. Simplistic and extreme portrayals generate simplistic and extreme policies.

3. If you are using celebrity spokespeople, make sure they are well-informed about your cause and respectful of the people in the video. Though not the perfect example, I think the videos and slideshows here (see the second video from the bottom, for example) avoid sensationalism, do a good job of being specific about what is going on, and make good use of an informed celebrity spokesperson.

4. If you are going to use images of Africans, don’t engage in blatant stereotyping, and be respectful of your subjects. The Good Intentions Are Not Enough blog has some good posts on the use of photography in aid marketing; similar principles could apply to videos.

5. Be transparent about what you will do with donations and proceeds from merchandise sales.

6. Be honest about the impact that the action you are requesting will have on the cause you are supporting.

How to Make an Advocacy Video about Africa

Photo credit

1. Assume that the people watching your video know nothing about your cause.* In fact, as far as you are concerned, their brains are completely devoid of content and unable to grasp any complexity.

2. When it comes to death, violence, and sickness, use the biggest, most impressive figures you can find, whether or not they are true. As long as the figure was once cited by someone, somewhere, you’re in the clear.

3. If possible, make a T-shirt (or baseball cap, or we just can't quite get over this one, a thong) and plug it in your video.

4. Do include celebrities. There are a few eloquent and well-informed celebrity spokespeople who conscientiously educate people about important causes. But that’s boring, so get the ones who spout incoherent nonsense,** and/or use really inappropriate props.

5. Most of these go without saying: include: yourself, as a savior/hero; poker** ; and Africans who are simultaneously needy and threatening (undernourished, emaciated, toting AK-47s).

6. Emotion: good. Loud music: Good. MTV-style editing: good. Good vs. evil: good. Nuance: bad. Eschew nuance.

7. Don’t waste any scarce video-seconds on how the actions you are inspiring will have an impact on the people for whom you are raising consciousness. Just go ahead and leave it out. Too complicated. Or, maybe there is no impact. There’s no time to figure it out.

*Actually, this is a real suggestion I found on an online guide to making advocacy videos.

**Favorite vacuous celebrity quote from this video, courtesy of Save Darfur Accountability Project: “We are not as ignorant as people think we are, we simply don’t know, and it’s not our fault!”

***Thanks to astute reader Andy Hall for sending us this one.

Click here for the follow-up post, How to Make an Advocacy Video about Africa, Take II.

How it helps NGOs to treat them as selfish

Let me respond to one major strand of comments on my recent post, Are we allowed to talk about the self-interest of NGO officials? Is it just too cynical to talk about NGO self-interest? Among the kinder comments received were that I don’t “trust anything or anyone not explicitly out to make as much money as possible.” Or that yours truly “says that no one is straightforward about their motives, so I wonder what his truly are.”

Well, political economy analysis actually leads to a MORE sympathetic view of an organization leader – like an NGO official – than a Sunday School world where he/she is personally either altruistic or selfish. Political economy recognizes organizational and political constraints that could leave an official almost no choice on how to behave. For example, NGOs can’t do their work without funds. And fund-raising may require that you (as NGO-leader) take an over-simplistic approach to the problem, over-promise, or (as in the example of my original post) overstate the importance of YOUR issue relative to all other issues. All of these practices may undermine your effectiveness, or hurt the effectiveness of other NGOs. But the alternative could be that your NGO disappears altogether, which could be even worse for the poor, and which few people would accept easily.

Political economy analysis identifies the crucial incentives and constraints, and looks for ways to modify them and improve the outcome. For example, an individual NGO would have a hard time subjecting themselves to independent evaluation if no other NGOs did so. They might get a critical review that wrecks their funding while the other NGOs keep spreading puff pieces about themselves. We can beat up an NGO for not wanting to know if their aid works, (and we do, because it’s still bad!) but it is also important to advocate a “Code of Good NGO Practice” for ALL NGOs, which would include independent evaluation.

Sex, Aid, and Rock & Roll: An August Lite Post

We’ve complained a lot about celebrity aid campaigns here on Aid Watch, but somebody must like them since they keep happening over and over. Who is the target audience?

The celebrity aid campaign of the past few years has exactly three components:

1. Angelina Jolie

2. Music by U2

3. Picture of African mother and baby

So who is the audience that likes to gaze upon Angelina, enjoys 1980s Rock, and wants to save helpless African women and children? The answer is now obvious: chauvinistic middle-aged white males! (Speaking as an expert middle-aged white male)

A more serious analysis might note the irony of using Hollywood women as sex objects and seeing African women as the passive recipients of aid chivalry, when one of the objectives of aid is gender equality…but let’s not go there.

And it’s easy to understand why the campaigns target chauvinistic middle-aged white males, since they have the deepest pockets.

Political economy is a lot more fun than you thought...

Are we allowed to talk about the self-interest of NGO officials?

Public officials might occasionally have other motives besides the altruistic pursuit of the public interest. In recent years, one of the boom fields in economics has been political economy (building upon a prior and related field called public choice). Both fields suggest that if we have a fuller picture of what drives public officials, which might include the desire to stay in power or personal gain, we would have a more realistic view of political outcomes. Of course, public officials also care about the public interest, and may be self-selected to be more altruistic than most. It’s too cynical to say they ONLY care about personal gain and power, and it’s too naïve to say they ONLY care about the public welfare. And, in recent years, we have started to view managers of official aid agencies with the same realism.

So why are we so reluctant to have the same realism about NGO officials? Many condemn any discussion of their motives being anything besides selfless devotion to the poor as hopeless cynicism. But why can’t we do political economy on NGOs?

One example is the way that aid has been increasingly fragmented into tiny pieces in recent years because there are increasingly many NGOs advocating different causes. Most of these causes are good ones, but the NGOs don’t take into account the negative effect of promoting THEIR cause on the OTHER causes. The political economy result is that, after feeling all the pressure, many aid agencies are trying to do many things at once to be effective.

I saw one recent example of shameless lobbying for one cause. A group known as Children’s Rights Information Network (CRIN) has a mission to put “children’s rights at the top of the global agenda.” CRIN began a campaign recently to lobby for appointments over 2010-2012 to more than 11 positions in international organizations (including the UN Secretary General) to be limited to those who have “the appropriate commitment, skills and experience to work effectively for children’s rights.”

Well, the World Bank lists “children and youth” as just one of 34 “major topic areas.” Moreover, the interpretation and practical value of “Children’s Rights” is still controversial – the World Bank did not even mention the concept in its exhaustive 2007 World Development Report on “Development and the Next Generation.”

Who is CRIN? It started as an alliance between Save the Children (particularly UK and Sweden branches) and UNICEF in 1991, and that’s pretty much what it remains today. Were the leaders of Save the Children completely indifferent to the large expansion that Save the Children would enjoy if Children’s Rights moved to the “top of the global agenda,” thanks to choosing the right people for 11 major positions? I think Save the Children really does care about poor children, but they could conceivably have less pristine motives. That’s not cynicism, that’s political economy.

Shameless aid behavior awards of the month

3. Bono sings “Every generation gets a chance to change the world.” Another inspirational call to arms to fight African poverty? No, Bono is commercially exploiting his “save Africa” image to shill for Blackberry, who are sponsoring the latest U2 tour." 2. “Children trust adults to keep their promises.” A parental advice web site?

No, World Vision UK is manipulating our feelings about children to campaign for increased aid.

Children rely on G8 promises. Children are speaking out for change – and the G8 must listen.

As if that were not enough, World Vision UK calls for more: some children should attend G8 meetings, to be trotted out for G8 photo-ops:

Shouldn’t their voices be heard at the top table? When will we see a G8 that rolls out the red carpet to listen to someone young and who is not in a suit? After all, it is always much harder as an adult to tell a child that a promise made is not being kept.

1. The Save Darfur thong (from the great blog “Wronging Rights”)

Bono and Foreigner

The long and remarkable reign of the celebrities in foreign aid shows no sign of abating. On a May 1 CNN special on TIME magazine’s new selection of the world’s 100 most influential people, according to a press release, “George Clooney — a four-time honoree — will sit down with U2 frontman and activist Bono to chat about fame and politics.”

In a desperate attempt to give some balanced perspective, let me be fair and point out that Bono’s organization, ONE.org, is supporting something I totally agree with, a campaign called Publish What You Fund (PWYF), which believes “Everyone can request and receive information on aid processes; Information on aid should be timely and accessible; Information on aid should be comparable; the right of access to information about aid should be promoted.” A million Amens to that. All you Bono fans, please agitate on behalf of PWYF.

I also confess that I LIKE the music of U2 and find many of their anthems to be genuinely inspirational. When I told my kids this, unfortunately, they pointed out that my credentials as a rock critic are pretty shaky. They know that I also like the band Foreigner.

Response to "Can Starbucks Buy A 'Saving Africa' Image for a Nickel?"

We sent our blog post on the Starbucks RED campaign to Starbucks last week and offered them space to publish a response. Here is their answer from Vivek Varma, Senior Vice President of Public Affairs: I suppose I should begin by thanking you for the opportunity to comment. It would have been nice to receive a call first so that the confusion in the Professor’s blog could have been addressed.

But let me layout the facts as we see them:

• Starbucks launched its partnership with (PRODUCT) RED in December 2008 with a selection of beverages that contributed five cents to the Global Fund from each drink purchased. All beverages turned (RED) on World AIDS Day and the company has since introduced the STARBUCKS (PRODUCT) RED Card, which contributes five cents from every purchase to the Global Fund. Starbucks has a multi-year relationship with (RED) and will introduce various (RED) products throughout that time.
• Your estimation of (RED) revenues generated is wrong. The fact is Starbucks has more than 12,000 stores in the U.S. and Canada and the (Starbucks) RED website and barista analysis has led you to an inaccurate conclusion of how many people have bought Starbucks (PRODUCT) RED products. As of March 2009, Starbucks customers have generated contributions equal to approximately 4.2 million daily doses of antiretroviral medicine through the purchase of select (Starbucks)RED products.
• To date, (PRODUCT) RED partners and events, including Starbucks, have generated over $130 million for the Global Fund to invest in AIDS programs in Africa. One hundred percent of this money is channeled to Global Fund-financed grants – no overhead is taken out.
• It is important to consider the collective power of these contributions since each partner brings something different to the table. Larger brands, with lower price point items, will garner more volume while smaller brands may help spread the message to niche audiences and new consumers, all the while raising money and expanding the base of people who are aware of the crisis of AIDS in Africa and willing to do something about it.
• While you call for Starbucks to report its results independently, The Global Fund reports contributions on an aggregate, not per partner, basis. You can always view aggregate contributions on the Global Fund web site at www.theglobalfund.org under pledges and contributions.

I hope this gives proper context to the Starbucks (RED) partnership. I must say it’s disappointing to read the Professor’s cynicism about NGOs and corporations that attempt to contribute to the crisis of AIDS in Africa. We can all do more, of course, but this particular blog is a miss.

Can Starbucks Buy a “Saving Africa” Image for a Nickel?

I was curious about what the going rate is these days for attracting customers who want to save Africa. Five cents was a little lower than I expected.

How much money is flowing to Africa from this? Aid Watch’s exclusive investigation consisted of asking about seven Starbucks cashiers around Greenwich Village how often they processed the Starbucks Red card, with its payoff of five cents for Africa per use. All except one cashier said it was rare to see them, maybe 1 or 2 in an 8-hour day. The one exception said they saw them about 10 times a day. So we have a payoff for Africa of between 5 and 10 cents per day per Starbucks cashier, with one outlier of 50 cents a day. This sample is obviously ridiculously unscientific, but perhaps it can attain the status of an anecdote.

The only excuse for my pitiful attempt at estimating RED card revenues is that I think it is really up to Starbucks to disclose to its customers how much money is really flowing to the Global Fund for AIDS in Africa. We are in luck -- Starbucks has a cool (RED) web site that actually documents in real time how many people are buying with the (RED) card (11,115!), how many Starbucks products they are buying (87,257), and how many days of AIDS medicine that translates into (10,146!).

OOPS, sorry, I misunderstood it. This is just a record of how many people have signed up online worldwide (11,115) to join the Starbucks RED campaign, how many Starbucks products they have pledged to buy, and how much that translates into in days of medicine. There is no verification that anyone actually buys the card or keeps their pledge. Even if they did, this would translate into a rather underwhelming contribution of $4,362.85 to the Global Fund. It’s not Starbucks’ fault that their customers don’t show much interest in the RED card, but Starbucks benefits even so.

Bill Gates celebrated the RED campaign as an example of what he sees as world-systemic change towards “creative capitalism,” where companies will respond to “reputational” philanthropic incentives as well as conventional profit ones. Yet if companies can obtain the RED branding, the Saving Africa reputation, for virtually nothing, just how strong is the incentive to give?

ONE Responds to Bono vs. Moyo, Round Two

By Edith Jibunoh, Africa Outreach Manager at ONE At ONE, we agree a vigorous public debate is needed on how best to combat extreme poverty in Africa, but your post suggesting ONE is trying to “discredit” and “misrepresent” Ms. Moyo is untrue and not particularly constructive. As anyone who goes to our website site can see, we aren’t trying to discredit her, we are responding, substantively, to her arguments. You suggest we aren’t addressing the merits of her proposals, but the first item we posted on our site was a seven page point-counter-point addressing the merits of her proposals. This document clearly lays out where we disagree with the arguments she is making.

In terms of the emails you refer to, yes, we emailed people in Africa who we work with to see what they thought, as many are involved directly with aid-funded initiatives. Their experience is very relevant in thinking through the impact of Ms. Moyo’s claims. So it wasn’t an attempt to shut a conversation down, but an effort to open one up. And it’s succeeded! We’ve also been in a direct and ongoing conversation with Ms. Moyo, before and after the book’s release. Our concerns are no surprise to her. We agree with your concerns about aid transparency and, as you know, we recently helped launch “publish what you fund”, an aid transparency effort. We share the goal of “asking that aid benefit the poor” (as you write on your website) and we campaign to ensure that it does.

Mr. Easterly, there is another thing we agree on: let’s make this a thoughtful and constructive discussion about the best policy for Africa. In that spirit, it would be good to know if you join Ms. Moyo in her belief that all aid to Africa (with the exception of humanitarian aid following emergencies) should be cut off in five years, and that Africans would not suffer as a result. As just one example, what do you think would happen to the 2 million Africans now on ARVs, funded by aid?

Lest you think we are misrepresenting Ms. Moyo's point of view on what aid should be exempted, see her own words below to Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

ABC News Foreign Correspondent: Is Aid Killing Africa?

Reporter: Philip Williams

Broadcast: 17/03/2009

WILLIAMS: And you're absolutely confident that removing that aid is not going to leave at least some people without food and medicine?

MOYO: I think the ones that will be effected most will probably be the African elite as opposed to the broader population.

WILLIAMS: What will they lose?

MOYO: I think they will lose possibly their bank accounts in Geneva in the worst-case scenario. But, I think beyond that they would also lose the ability to have leisure time and they'll be required to actually go out and start to work hard to find money to support their social programs in Africa.

WILLIAMS: If you cut off aid within 5 years, surely that's going to leave millions of people without the support they are now dependent on - food aid, medical aid - aid that really keeps people alive.

MOYO: I don't believe that's the case. Most Africans do not see any of the aid that you are alluding to. It's.... again, their best case scenario on some projects is 20 cents in the dollar that actually makes it to an African - and that's best case. Effectively, if we continue down this path, we will have many more Africans living in poverty in many... in a few years to come, and that is really the problem - that there are no jobs coming out of an aid model.

Bono vs. Moyo, Round Two

Last week, ONE, the advocacy organization founded by Bono, apparently sent out an email to some of the Africans in their address book. The subject: Dambisa Moyo’s new book Dead Aid, recently released in the US. The plan: to persuade some high profile Africans to provide quotes in support of ONE’s position that Moyo’s ideas are dangerously mistaken. The vigorous and public debate that has greeted the release of Dead Aid is a good thing for transparency and effectiveness in aid, no matter what you think of Moyo’s book. ONE apparently doesn't agree. There are two things wrong with ONE’s campaign to discredit Moyo.

First of all, ONE misrepresents Moyo’s ideas to better tear them down. For example, ONE characterizes Moyo’s plan as a call to “shut off all aid in 5 years,” when Moyo is very clear about excluding humanitarian aid and NGO/ charitable aid from her discussion.

Second, rounding up some Africans who happen to disagree with Zambian-born Moyo doesn’t alter the quality of her proposals, which deserve to be debated on their own merits. (We’ve blogged about the intellectually dishonest technique of the “authenticity trump card” before.) When the ONE campaign says in its email “We are collecting quotes from Africans who might disagree with her…”, it seems to be saying we will not trust or allow Africans to have this debate on its merits on their own.

The people at ONE seem to implicitly justify this campaign by portraying themselves as the only small voice bold enough to speak out against Moyo. An article on their website claims that “while Dead Aid has been getting a lot of buzz, it hasn't been getting much, if any, scrutiny.” Even a cursory scan of Moyo’s press shows that Dead Aid has gotten reviews from all sides, plenty of them vociferously critical.

Do Bono and ONE yet understand that aid to the poor is not just a matter a celebrity fund-raising, but a difficult challenge that needs a vigorous debate on what works and what doesn’t?

Did U2 Have Africa Celebrate U2?

Not sure what to make of this, so I just state the facts: an African-American record producer arranged to have well-known African singers do U2 songs for this album. U2 obviously had to sign off on an album in which Africa thanks U2 with U2 songs, due to copyright laws, and in fact the producer thanks U2 band members.

One African who is not celebrating U2 these days is Dambisa Moyo (who is speaking at NYU tomorrow night), author of the new book Dead Aid, in which she says:

Scarcely does one see Africa’s (elected) officials or … African policymakers… offer an opinion on what should be done, or what might actually work to save the continent from its regression. This very important responsibility has, for all intents and purposes, and to the bewilderment of many an African, been left to musicians who reside outside Africa.

What do you think?