The last newspaper I read in 2013 (Sueddeutsche Zeitung) closed with an overview of the year (a rather poor one), but interestingly, out of a dozen topics, development aid got mentioned as one of the first. It's usually a topic that very few Germans care about, and is the biggest conversation killer when I've responded I work in the field when someone at a dinner party asks "so what do you do?" (you'd think I'd have responded that I dust archives for a living).
Even stranger was that, on the last day of my office job officially (which I quit, for those who do not follow this blog regularly) was that nearly all of the text was about the end of "moral motivations" for development aid. "Even" Bono (whose NGO I worked for last year) had in an early 2013 TED-Talk had argued that it's about "facts", not just swooshy "moral". The article ended with the conclusion that development aid is now all "business" in terms of process and perhaps even ends, a la Warren Buffet and Bill Gates.
In an article from yesterday (in 2014 - happy new year, by the way) that my husband was reciting for me in the evening when the kids were in bed (yes, our life can be like this - us nerds reading out sections from the NYT and Economist to each other…), William Easterly (a development expert and professor) was doing some serious Jeffrey Sachs bashing (economist, head of a university institute and also development expert). Nothing new (between the two), except that again the notion of "aid as evil" cropped up (Sachs believes aid can provide a kick-start to development or fix inhibitors, Easterly thinks this is simplistic and even detrimental crap, to provide a nutshell overview).
These articles made me angry. I notice I get angry about such issues more and more often, and for the following reason: right hand slapping left hand, shooting yourself in your own foot, or whatever metaphor would be suitable along these lines. Am I seriously sitting here, in a rich developing country, thinking that "helping" (aka moral motivation for development aid) is perhaps evil, and I should be coming up with amazing investment strategies and trade regulation changes instead? In my own little "bubble" (global health - which is health policy for developing countries), yes, I believe that getting patents and pharmaceutical companies to react to developing country markets and needs, on the conditions that they can pay for, is important. But if there is one pregnant woman dying, one infant dying at birth, one child at risk at getting HIV during pregnancy or birth (or breastfeeding) from its positive mother, do I think trade deals, financial incentives, and systemic changes - or do I think "just help NOW, do whatever is possible, save this one life and prevent suffering!".
It's the latter that dominates. It's what links me, as a human being, to another human being, no matter where they are born or live, or under what circumstances. It's definitely not the connection that we share to something called a financial market, intellectual property, or optimizing business processes. Or for the matter of fact, "facts".
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