photos: Evert Nieuwenhuis, University of Leiden

The White Man's Burden: Why The West’s Efforts To Aid The Rest Have Done So Much Ill And So Little Good

More than $ 2.3 trillion has been spent on development aid by Western countries over the past fifty years. William Easterly argues that the West has been generous but that efforts have been ineffective.

William Easterly is a former World Bank economist, Professor at New York University and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He had plenty input to write The White Man's Burden in 2006.

Easterly questions the utopian social engineering that development agencies bring to the local community. There isn't one big plan that will solve poverty, there are pieces, small practical solutions that people will come up with on their own.

According to Easterly the world's poor need more focused trial and error programs. The traditional planner needs to make way for the searcher. This is what works in democracies and markets in the West. Searchers treat problem solving as a process of discovery, relying on competition and feedback to figure out what works. Failure is what comes with trial and error learning. Take responsibility and learn from mistakes made in the past!

Feedback and accountability is what is missing in this sector. Easterly calls for aid agencies to scientifically evaluate their efforts and to establish mechanisms to do so.

He emphasizes the importance of the local situation and details. Approaches should be flexible and created from within local communities instead of from the outside. It is the searchers who recognize the effectiveness of flexible approaches and who work with local communities to solve problems, often using market-based solutions. Keep it small, search for solutions, experiment, learn and work with the poor. Doing this on a large scale can make a difference.

The White Man's Burden has recently been translated into Dutch. Easterly will be in The Netherlands on Tuesday 11 September to participate in a debate with Ruud Treffers, Director General of International Cooperation at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ruerd Ruben, Professor at Centre for Development Issues Nijmegen.

The debate will be held at LUX in Nijmegen at 20.00 on Tuesday 11 September 2007. The debate will be in English. Reservations can be made at +31 (0)900 5894636.