Charity hopeth all things

Should rich nations give to poor nations? Put bluntly like that, the question of international aid demands the answer ‘yes’. Anyone who tries to qualify the ‘yes’ is liable to be criticised as selfish, unfeeling and inhuman. In his The End of Poverty Jeffrey Sachs sharpens the question. Should very rich people in very rich nations give to very poor nations, especially to the nations of sub-Saharan Africa? His answer is an unqualified ‘yes’.

He urges all the leading industrial nations and, in particular, the USA to raise official development assistance to 0.7 per cent of gross domestic product in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals proposed at the United Nations by Secretary-General Kofi Annan in September 2000. Many of these goals are rather general (‘eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education’, a reduction of two-thirds in the under-five mortality rate between 1990 and 2015, a halving by 2015 of the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water) and their statement amounts more to a wish list than an agenda.