CIDA - Net Gains

Dambisa Moyo credits bednets with saving the lives of Africans from malaria, but then she uses even that understanding as a soapbox for a claims of how aid has ruined the continent. She instead claims that, "Africans can make their own anti-malaria bed-nets (thereby creating jobs of Africans and a real chance for the continent's economic prospects), rather than encouraging all and sundry to dump malaria nets across the continents, which subsequently puts Africans out of business."  If there was ever an example of how Moyo's book ignores reality for the sake of flawed logic, this is it.Let's be clear, modern treated malarian bed-nets have saved millions of lives in only a few years.  More on this with be dealt with in the next post, but it's important here that we deal with Moyo's claim.Bed-nets as a prevention against malaria have been present in Africa for over 100 years, with only moderate success, and only with the elite that could afford them. Many were made by Africans themselves.  Greatly subsidized by colonial largesse, these nets rarely lasted even one season and had to keep being resupplied at a rate that challenged supply.  The modern nets distributed during this last decade are specially treated, cover more than one person, and last for lengthy periods.  What Moyo doesn't reveal is that millions of these nets are being produced in Africa now, creating thousands of jobs and improving, or even starting, local industry.But Africa is huge, massive, and people primarily live in remote regions. Most exist on less than a dollar a day and live beyond the regular routes of market goods such as the new nets. It's one thing for Moyo to ignore the remarkable success story that is the modern bed-net program, but it's something else to look for an African solution when most rural Africans aren't even part of the economic picture.  She calls for free-market and capitalist solutions instead of aid, but most companies will frequent those places where market conditions exist and people have the money to purchase the products.  In the main, that's not rural Africa. Large and small companies desire to invest primarily in those regions where natural resources such as minerals or oil are abundant, yet these are present only in certain regions of Africa - the rest lose out.It is for those very people that foreign aid is designed.  Numerous African leaders who travel to the West seeking investment know that large portions of their populations eke out living far outside the track of normal economic solutions, and it is they who are calling for treated bed-nets from around the world to assist their populations. These are hardly backward-looking leaders. In so many ways they would agree with Moyo's claim that investment and more access to markets are key to their peoples' futures. They are right, as is Moyo in this aspect, and they are robustly seeking investment. But they shake their heads at Moyo's logic when it comes to the vast majority of their populations who live outside of market access and who face high mortality rates in such regions. These are progressive and accountable African leaders who feel deeply saddened that Dambisa Moyo reasons as though every African has a credit card. They understand easily that her logic is ideological, but their greatest concern is that the effect of her writing will curtail the very aid that provides such bed-nets in the first place and which have saved millions of lives. Her failed logic doesn't just involve theories, but the lives of millions who are alive today because of effective aid and modern treatments.