White people are finally starting to "get it". http://youtu.be/dyf2Cf5GkTY See Dambisa Moyo's interview about her book "Dead Aid" The statistics showing how aid is actually hurting African countries and not allowing them to develop on their own the way the rest of the world has.
Read 'Poor Economics' by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. Duflo is at MIT and is all about trials to figure out what works with aid.
Read 'The Bottom Billion' by Paul Collier who is a development economist at Oxford.
Read 'The Idealist' by Nina Munk which is about how we can say that Geoffrey Sach's millennium village project has failed.
Read 'Africa Rising' by Vijay Mahajan about how many countries in Africa are actually been doing well economically for the first time in decades.
Read 'The White Man's Burden' by Bill Easterly about how he thinks aid has all failed.
The development of the poorest countries is incredibly important. These people all have thought heaps about it and are very serious about wanting to help.
Nobody really knows what the answer is but at least get a picture of the different viewpoints.
I second Poor Economics, great book. It's fascinating how the book shows that entrepreneurship is actually MORE prevalent in poor societies than in rich ones.
Bill Gates fights incredibly hard to try to prove that aid is incredibly effective and considers this a "myth" to be dispelled. What do you think about the concept?
Except that Bill Gates isn't going around building furniture himself. More like donating a small part of money for purposes like that, and a big part of money for science and technology which can help eradicate bigger problems(like disease and hunger).
