Zoo Station

Nick Kristof picked up on my post on TED Africa and wrote a short note about it in the New York Times (it's behind the wall, so don't bother). I reproduce it here in full.

July 1, 2007, 11:01 pm
Overdoing the African Negatives?

By Nicholas D. Kristof

The blog Zoo Station has an interesting post about aid and Africa, noting that at the recent TED conference a Ugandan journalist had attacked Bono and the foreign aid lobby. Bono was apparently rather taken aback, but it is indeed a point of view that you hear periodically from Africans. In Rwanda, President Kagame voiced a similar disquiet about aid to us, and Bill Easterly has taken it to great lengths in his book. I think the debate is useful but that more aid is still beneficial, and that health interventions in particular have a good record. To me, Paul Collier’s new book, “The Bottom Billion,” gets the balance exactly right.

Zoo Station also takes a swipe in passing at me, but I have a bit of sympathy for his point that the focus is so relentlessly on Africa’s problems that it becomes difficult to attract investment capital in the places that are succeeding. I don’t think the problem is to stop covering the problem places — in that case the death toll in Darfur now would be 1.5 million instead of a few hundred thousand — but it is a real problem that the image of Africa is saturated with negatives.

I have a response written up, but I will post it later tonight when I return from meetings.