Most development aid is actively harmful. Selling goods for less than production cost is dumping, a business practice condemned as predatory; aid is just dumping with the price set to zero.
The horror stories are legion. Donated clothes decimate local textile industries. Shells of buildings, silted dams, and unfinished “pilot projects” dot the African landscape. Young white people flock to expensive hotels for useless “conferences” that amount to paid exotic vacations. Peace Corps yahoos are flown out at great cost to teach Western hairdressing [...] But aid’s worst consequence is the continuation, and amplification, of the attitude that change must always come from outside. My friend Gavin Chait calls it “the recolonization of Africa through aid.”