The Bottom Billion

"There’s been a tendency for people looking at global poverty to either emphasise the extraordinary difficulty in making a difference or to make it seem almost too easy. What I really liked about The Bottom Billion is that he acknowledges how difficult it can be to end poverty, but also offers some important ideas about how one can actually make a difference. No. Collier acknowledges that it’s often harder than it looks. He does cite, for example, a figure of money that was intended for rural health programmes in Chad: it turned out that 99 per cent of the money was lost along the way. But he also has a lot of admiration for groups that pay attention to local needs and have local ownership. He looks at what, realistically, the world can do – for example, by promoting trade, by reducing conflicts and wars in the developing world. It’s a very clear-minded, non-ideological look at what one can actually do to chip away at global poverty. I think one of the issues that the humanitarian world maybe hasn’t paid adequate attention to is the problem of conflict – in Africa in particular. This is something I’ve seen in my travels. You just can’t address poverty by building schools or building clinics in a country where warlords are running around burning schools and killing teachers. Also, conflict in poor countries tends to be incredibly contagious – it is devastating not only to that country but to surrounding countries. Collier argues, I think correctly, that this is a crucial issue, and that there are some things we can begin to do about it. Not in every case – but the West should try much harder to prevent conflicts before they happen, rather than just try to address them after they’ve already erupted, at which point it can be very difficult. Yes. For example, peacekeepers aren’t a magical solution by any means. But they’re pretty cheap compared to the $100 billion that is the cost of the average war in Africa. If one can spend $100 million on peacekeepers and it reduces the chance of a $100 billion war, that’s a pretty good investment."