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The International Development Institutions

26 février 2010, 00:00

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The International Development Institutions (the WB, the IDB, the AsDB, the ADB, the IADB, the ERDB, etc) spend tens of billions of dollars to try to eradicate poverty. David Bornstein''''s "How to Change the World" and Prahalad''s "Fortune at the Bottom" make for good reading, contain many excellent ideas and examples of success stories. But they don''t sufficiently emphatically warn that ALL “powerful new idea”-driven, or “socially entrepreneured” poverty-reduction projects are bound to fail if the beneficiaries don’t have the “meme” of self-upliftment.

Graham Hancock’s “Lords of Poverty” brought to the attention of the wider public a certain number of truths about the very serious flaws in the international aid business, including by the International Development Institutions mentioned above and other International Financial Institutions, such as the IMF, the BIS, the WTO etc.

Michael Maren, William Easterly, Shirley Lord and others have written about the devastating effects that “humanitarian imperialism” and its corollary, aid-dependency can have on the targeted beneficiaries. Mohammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank model has been very successful because the promoyer has struck the right mix of ingredients of a “soft heart”, “financially self-sustaining, and normal-profit-generating” operations, and “disciplined beneficiaries”. The essential ingredient is what I call this “meme” of self-upliftment. A “meme” is unit of subtly-acquired and painfully-rehearsed behaviour pattern that can be transmitted, like the gene, across individuals and groups of people, and embed cultural, near-biological values. Unless the beneficiaries  have developed a critical mass of this “meme” of self-upliftment and the poverty-reduction projects nurture rather than undermine this meme, poverty-reduction programmes are bound to become victims of the pitfalls that Hancock, Maren, Easterly and Shirley Lord have warned about in their studies.