Customer Reviews

The Trouble with Africa: Why Foreign Aid Isn't Working

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As a colleague and friend of Robert Calderisi, I looked forward to this book. He has written a skillful and comprehensive account of the issues, people, politics and economics of post-Independence Africa, from his vantage point of several assignments in various parts of the continent. He weaves his personal experiences with the African people and their leaders with carefully selected historical background needed to understand why things were bound to happen as they did. This book is hard to put down, and the human and political stories and the economics are told with care, and with humor. He was there, you are, too.

There is more than enough blame to go around, and Calderisi presents a balanced and, at times, embarrassing account of the excesses on all sides: the elites running these countries, the donors who came to help, and, in the chapter on the Chad-Cameroon pipeline, the foreign investors who sought alliances in the name of profit. His abiding respect and admiration for Africans comes through loud and clear, as does his distaste for their self-absorbed and often kleptocratic leaders. His recommendations for how Africans themselves must turn things around appear bolted to his readable and, very often, entertaining text, but they will stimulate the thoughtful aid practitioner or friend of Africa to think about how that might take place.

While Calderisi's book will not satisfy the reader seeking deep history (try Guy Arnold's impressive new "Africa: A modern history") rigorous economics, a call to arms (Jeff Sachs tried that in his "The end of poverty") or blame-mongering against NGOs, donors and corrupt elites, it is an excellent introduction to why Africa is the way it is, and why it deserves our help as the development challenge of the early 21st century.

Calderisi states early on that this book is "a personal essay." That turns out to be code for "This doesn't have to be particularly coherent, nor do I have to back up my recommendations with systematic evidence." Finally, the writing is not particularly inviting, with lines like, "unlike photographs, economies cannot be developed in a dark room" (p. 171) or "Africa has been in my blood since the age of fifteen" (p. 35).

However, Amartya Sen once wrote that "there is a strong case for judging a book by its best contributions, not its weakest points." [1] Calderisi worked for the World Bank in Africa for many years: he has many interesting stories and a great deal of perspective. He gives the World Bank's perspective on the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline, the now notorious Structural Adjustment Programs of the 1980s, and many more personal stories. While there is certainly more to these stories than the Bank's perspective, understanding the Bank's reasoning is insightful.

In addition to these stories and perspectives, the author makes ten recommendations, many of them unfortunately unsupported by the body of the book. Most of the recommendations seem sensible (as do many recommendations that haven't worked, as William Easterly has indicated [2]), but Calderisi gives no detail as to how one would implement them nor does he successfully build up to them. I may not be confident that Jeffrey Sachs's plan [3] would be successful, but I give him credit for having thought it through and outlined it in significant technical detail.

The book begins much worse than it ends. In the first chapter, "Looking for Excuses," the author argues that many traditional arguments for African poverty are false; but the reasoning tends to be specious. Speaking of both the Cold War and colonialism, he argues that it is difficult to make the link between those events and Africa's problems, but then he attributes clear causality to what he calls the "benefits" of the Cold War and colonialism: it's not clear how we know that they caused benefits but not that they caused problems. In his argument that the manipulation of African peoples by Cold War movers is not responsible, he says, "there is little evidence that the superpowers did more damage than African states themselves." Even if they did the same amount of damage, that would be double the damage African countries would have done on their own. Elsewhere in the book, Calderisi relies on a few select quotes to demonstrate that every month in recent African history is "replete with tyranny and injustice" (p. 63). True or untrue, a statement like that deserves a decent standard of evidence.

I'm not sorry that I read this book, but I'd recommend you put William Easterly's White Man's Burden and Jeffrey Sachs's The End of Poverty higher on your list.

[1] Amartya Sen, "The Man Without a Plan," Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006.

[2] William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth, MIT Press, 2002.

[3] Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty, Penguin, 2006.

For Robert Calderisi, experienced development economist and ex-World Bank official, Africans would be a lot better off today if it weren't for their backward culture. "The Trouble with Africa" presents Calderisi's argument that the continent's scourges of poverty, corruption and mismanagement are of Africans' own making; "Africa's handicaps are inbred," he writes bluntly (143). The author believes aspects of what he calls "the African character" (e.g. fatalism, undue deference to authority and an ethic favoring collective distribution over private accumulation of wealth) must be corrected before African societies can develop. In making this case, he presents himself as a hard-headed realist doling out uncomfortable truths which other Africa specialists are too politically correct to utter--even if they secretly recognize they're true.

Many Westerners who've worked in Africa will recognize the cultural characteristics Calderisi describes; as a returned Peace Corps Volunteer I know them well. The problem I have with his approach is that it's based on an outdated concept of culture as a set of essential traits, and it confuses cause with effect. Culture is not some timeless essence passed down unchanged from the ancestors, but a dynamic system constantly being reshaped by politics, economics and history. As an anthropologist I'm uncomfortable with the author's reference to "the African character"--not because I'm concerned it might offend someone, but because a vast scientific literature accumulated over the last half century has shown the danger of viewing culture as an independent variable. Another ex-World Bank economist (Paul Collier in "The Botton Billion") convincingly outlines structural and historical explanations for Africa's plight which have nothing to do with culture and aren't even specific to Africa. Calderisi, alas, completely ignores such explanations.

"The Trouble with Africa" tries to account for the near-universal failure of Western development policies in Africa over the last four decades using little more than personal vignettes and anecdotal evidence; its author seems uninterested in rethinking the assumptions that underlay those failed policies. To apply a metaphor from my own profession, Calderisi is like a teacher whose students have all flunked the exam. Such a teacher should at least stop to wonder, "What's wrong with my approach? Where did my instruction fall short?" Calderisi, in contrast, asks only "What's wrong with them? Why don't they get it?" As long as he keeps focusing on these questions and grounding his answers in antiquated culturalist fallacies, he is not the hard-headed realist he thinks he is.

I have enjoyed the candor of this book. While it can be said that the author looks at things via the rose glasses of "elite life" in Africa I do agree with much of what he has stated. Care must be taken however to see that many expatriates who throng the shores of Africa do so with fat salaries and exclusive housing to live lifestyles that would never be possible in America or Europe. This behind the wire lifestyle has the tendency to jade the our view and corrupt our ability to look clearly from ground level. I have spend 17 years in Africa, not behind the Ivory towers and five star hotels but in the bush and with the people carrying out aid projects that do make a difference because they are done at a local level and with families rather than governments.I would also note that, while governments in Africa balk against accountability so do our friends in the IMF and World Bank. Money is handed out like toilet paper and little is done to truly assure its proper use. After all its not my money.

This is a must-read, especially for those who can't make sense of the aid and/or development effort in Africa. Calderisi raises some important points that will be difficult for some people to swallow, but many of us who have lived in rural Africa and have been engaged for considerably longer than a 3 to 4 week stint as a "volunteer or eco tourist" finish our long term appointments feeling discouraged, disillusioned, and disheartened because of the very issues Calderisi addresses. Granted, corruption and greed are not specific to Africa, but when you go back to your village in rural Africa and see people dying unnecessarily for want of basic needs or reasonable medical care, while billions of dollars are being pumped into the African aid sinkhole, it leaves one with a cognitive dissonance that is difficult to reconcile. And while it is reasonable to expect G8 members to keep their commitments, throwing more money at the problem without demanding real accountability does nothing but exacerbate or perhaps promote waste and corruption. Sure, some of the book's sections lack depth, but Calderisi certainly has the direct knowledge of Africa that Jeffrey Sachs is lacking in his lovely and hopeful, but perhaps naive, "The End of Poverty". Maybe the truth, and the answer, lie somewhere in between the two. The book was intended more as a cross between an op/ed and memoirs and, when viewed in that fashion, it hits its mark well enough. Many of us who have been there will agree that very little money actually gets out to the people who need it the most and Calderisi's book describes some of the places it actually does go. What the book doesn't even begin to touch on is how much of this money, in addition to the white elephant projects and inflated salaries Calderisi describes, goes to support the hotel & restaurant industry across Africa, as countless workshops and conferences are held in high-end hotels all over the continent to discuss the "African" or "AIDS problem", while people in the rural areas continue to get sicker and poorer. The lack of transparency and accountability makes it difficult to write the book that really needs to be written, but Calderisi's book joins a scant few others that raise the cry for rationality in our aid efforts in Africa. I left my copy with my Malawian colleagues who serve as teachers, headmasters, and development workers in the rural area and who rarely have access to books and ideas outside of what the government wants them to know. Perhaps, after reading the book, they will understand why the schools continue to fall into disrepair, the children continue to get sick and die, the women continue to bleed to death in childbirth, and the people continue to get poorer at the expense of the "ruling class." Maybe then they will stand up and demand change from within rather than aid from outside.

The author (mostly) writes about himself, and his plush life as an UN diplomat. His style is poor, his insights are predictable.

There are so many books which could bring you understanding of this magnificent continent as Martin Meredith "The Fate of Africa" (history of every country on the continent since independence) or books by Kapuscinsky, if you want to understand how ordinary people live in Africa, rather than how wrong and dismal politics is made.

There are few interesting observations World Bank envoy makes concerning how wrong international help could go. He points out that unconditional help makes things worse. He gives several revealing examples how undertakings supposed to bring good, make more misery instead.

Having recently traveled to Africa for the first time, I left that continent, as did my fellow travelers, wondering what could be done to better the lives of the people we met. It seemed that the troubles were monumental, and that solutions would be nearly impossible. As I read Mr. Calderisi's book, I felt that here were the concrete, rational ideas that are needed to begin the transformation. It made me wish I had the expertise and leadership abilities to get started on it NOW and I only hope that in the very near future that someone with Mr. Calderisi's insight and knowledge will make this a priority and start implementing his ten ways of changing Africa. A truly thought-provoking and inspirational book.

Every 12 hours the same number killed at the WTC perish from AIDS in Africa, which has 2/3 of the world's cases. In a year 150,000 die giving birth, It is the only region of the world with regular savage wars, and the only continent that has grown steadily poorer over the last 30 year - between '70 and '00 Africa lost half its share of world markets to other developing nations. Over 50% of its population is under eighteen. Finally, making improvement even more difficult, at least 70,000 skilled graduates leave every year.

Calderisi believes most of Africa's misfortunes are self-imposed through mismanagement and destructive values. He points out that half the world's aid has gone to Africa lately. (Yet, to protect its farmers, the EU also spends $350 billion/year - 14X aid given to all of Africa and equal to its annual income - thereby damaging its farmers and helping cause economic problems.)

Calderisi rejects each of the traditional explanations for Africa's poverty. He begins by pointing out that despite racism and poverty, most slaves' descendants in the West lead better lives than those remaining in Africa. As for colonialism, there is practically no country or civilization which was not someone else's colony at some point; an often overlooked point is that Africa has benefited from colonizers' new technology, education, and ideas. "The Trouble with Africa" agrees that the Cold War did bring problems to Africa, but also points out that it only involved four nations. As for its debt burden - in '98 Western nations wrote off $50 billion in African debt, nearly as much as the World Bank loaned it in the prior 50 years, and in '05 another $40 billion was canceled.

Having few deep-water ports and too many countries (48 south of the Sahara, 22 of which have less than ten million people) are problems that Calderisi believes limit Africa. However, his major point is that no other continent has experienced such prolonged dictatorships - eg. Gabon (39 years), Togo (37), and four others over 20 years. Associated with this is the fact that in most of Africa no one is safe.

Half of all Africans live in four countries - Nigeria (127 million), Ethiopia (64), Democratic Republic of Congo (51), and South Africa (43).

Major negative values include the fact that if someone succeeds, however, modestly, relatives will often insist on sharing the fruits; further, they are not savers - such behavior is often considered traitorous to their families. Use of leadership for personal advantage is accepted, even expected - for example, class sizes frequently run to 150-200 because of fund diversion. Most uneducated Africans are fatalistic - simply accepting bad outcomes. Another problem is that culprits are seldom punished, though Calderisi offers no data to support this point. Finally, high exchange rates, taxes, and local content requirements further impair Africa's progress.

Calderisi' Recommendations: Install mechanisms for tracing and recovering public funds. Require all heads of state and senior officials to open their bank accounts to public scrutiny. Cut direct aid in half, allowing greater oversight - saved monies could be used for general programs, though what this means was not made clear. Focus aid on the 4-5 nations serious about reducing poverty, and impose much fewer restrictions. Require all countries to hold internationally-supervised elections. Promote a free press and independent judiciary. Supervise the running of Africa's schools and AIDS programs to prevent diversions. Finally, combine the World Bank, IMF, and U.N. Development Program to eliminate duplication and working at cross-purposes.

"The Trouble with Africa" makes valuable points - obviously something is seriously wrong for the continent to remain so backward for so long. However, the book would be greatly improved with greater quantification, detail, and documentation. For example, give a credible estimation of how much AIDS and education funding is wasted/diverted, and how this occurs. I also would have liked detail on why there are so many horrible civil wars within Africa.

For those that can go this way and that, there is trouble in Africa, there is trouble with Africa. Without placing blame squarely on the shoulders of the guilty, there will be no resolution. While the author lived only a couple of places in Africa, the indictment of the continent as a whole is not too far from the mark. Foreign aid does not work, because they are getting too much of what they really don't need which is lots and lots of money and no way to manage it except stealing it and whisking it away to banking institutions abroad. There are far too many well meaning Americans and Europeans that see the problems with a filter and fail to grasp the magnitude of the problems on the continent. For instance, instead of sending people to live in Africa, to learn and understand what is going to work, everyone sends money, money and more money. Someone props up this dictator for 10 years or so and then wonders why he spits in their face when the winds change and we ask him to behave. Africa and the Middle East were the two areas that were carved up by colonial powers in the 1800s and 1900s, the middle east is beginning to recover and come into its own, Africa is in far worse shape. This book does bring ideas back to the discussion regarding why it is in turmoil and how the rest of the world can manage it.

At a time when the right wing is delusional, and the left is mired down in it's own special version of conservatism; ie "Political Correctness", it is refreshing to see pragmatic solutions offered by someone close to the subject of Africa. As Mr Calderisi puts it:

"Politcal Correctness is hard to resist. Especially thousands of miles from the hardships that it covers up." One doesn't have to be in a burning building for long, to realize the fire suppression system is not working.

While the book reads as a memoir, Mr Calderisi's 30 years of experiencing the African people directly, makes the case for continuing foreign aid, but not in the business as usual mode. The age of terrorism has shown us the threat posed by failed societies makes the common welfare of nations more important than ever.

At a time when as Mr Calderisi puts it,"Foriegn aid is dwindling, why accelerate the process?" We can see that what money is still available, needs more than ever to be spent wisely. I found the suggestions outlined in the book to be obvious, and very workable. It's a shame that other interests than those of the African people, will be probably be considered first.