Senior Fellow Charles Kenny was interviewed by allAfrica.com about foreign aid to Africa.
From the Article
There have been some scathing accounts of aid to Africa in recent years, including Dambisa Moyo's book, "Dead Aid." Your book is quite optimistic.
The last few years have actually been really wonderful for Africa and actually it's hard to come up with a thing to be negative about. The Aids crisis continues, although thankfully it appears to be peaking.
Growth in Africa in the last 10 years has been phenomenal. It's been faster than in OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries certainly. We've continued to see improvements in child health, adult health, literacy, education rates, civil and political rights and so on and so forth. We've just seen really widespread progress.
Aid is not primarily responsible for that. The actions of African people themselves is primarily responsible for that. But aid has played a role in some places. For example, we've seen a dramatic role-out in access to vaccines, partially financed and supported by aid programs. That's slashed by about three-quarters the number of Africans who die of measles each year, for example. [There are] some really impressive changes in the quality of life in Africa, some of which have been supported by aid.
In your book you say income is only one measure of success. Can you tell us about some of the other measures and how those stand up in Africa?
We've seen considerable progress in child and infant mortality over the last 40 years. Health is really an important measure of quality of life because it's hard to have a quality of life if you're dead. We're seeing people in Africa live considerably longer. Life expectancy is up about 10 years over the last 40 years.
We're seeing improvements in literacy. Literacy rates in Africa have almost doubled since 1960. The number of people in Africa dying in wars is at pretty much an all-time low, at least since we have statistics going back to the 60s. Civil rights, human rights, war deaths, deaths from other causes, literacy and education – Africa is doing better than it ever was before. And the great news is that over the last 10 years income has also picked up across large parts of Africa. So it's a very broad-based story of progress.