Aid Effectiveness Quotes

One of the most ridiculous defenses of foreign aid is that it is a very small part of our national income. If the average American set fire to a five-dollar bill, it would be an even smaller percentage of his annual income. But everyone would consider him foolish for doing it.

Foreign aid is taking money from the poor people of a rich country and giving it to the rich people of a poor country.

Aid makes itself superfluous if it is working well. Good aid takes care to provide functioning structures and good training that enables the recipient country to later get by without foreign aid. Otherwise, it is bad aid.

Can we really believe that we are living a good life, an ethically decent life if we don't do anything serious to help reduce poverty around the world and help save the lives of children or adults who are likely to die if we don't increase the amount of aid we are giving.

It takes four months to ship food aid and 40 percent of the cost is in the shipping. People cannot eat shipping costs. We have had people die when there are surpluses in the markets.

Well-spent aid money is saving lives for a few thousand dollars per life saved.

The overriding purpose of foreign assistance must be genuine development, not the assuaging of Western guilt or the care and feeding of the massive network of career professionals, non-profit organizations and private sector companies that constitute the global aid industry.

By helping the poor, we must be able to remove their poverty. By extending help to one here and one there in the form of providing food will not remove poverty

International aid as a means of development is a major failure, and not just in Haiti.

I believe our foreign assistance should be scrutinized, should be debated, and that we should strike the right balance, but in all cases the foreign assistance that we provide around the world should be used to further our national security interests.

Foreign aid just doesn't have the constituency that domestic programs do.

The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.

Foreign aid is neither a failure nor a panacea. It is, instead, an important tool of American policy that can serve the interests of the United States and the world if wisely administered.

Aid can work where there is good governance, and usually fails where governments are unable or unwilling to commit aid to improve the lives of their people.

The best aid to give is intellectual aid, a gift of useful knowledge. A gift of knowledge is infinitely preferable to a gift of material things.

'Dead Aid' is about the inefficacy and the limitations of large-scale aid programs in creating economic growth and reducing poverty in Africa.

In Africa today, we recognise that trade and investment, and not aid, are pillars of development.

You don’t produce development through aid; you produce it through private investment which creates jobs.

We are for aiding our allies by sharing of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we're against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We're helping 107. We've spent 146 billion dollars. With that money, we bought a 2 million dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya[n] government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.

Traditional charity is still fairly focused on how it makes donors feel as opposed to outcomes for people that need help.

The aid system is broken. The international aid system was designed for the 20th century. However, we are in the 21st century.

There's a unique thing about the UK, where you give a very generous foreign aid budget to support globally, which is spent wisely. We partner with the government here to make sure that that money is spent well.

It's always a tricky thing, trying to make aid sustainable.

One of the things we have to acknowledge is that if you look at Haiti, many billions of dollars have gone into development aid there that have not been effective.

Of course, aid is only one small part of international development. Some of the greatest benefits to the world's poorest can be achieved through policy changes by developed countries.