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For doubters of development aid, how about some good news for a change? If you were at the Science Museum in London on Monday night, you would have heard a lot of success stories from Bill and Melinda Gates. The American billionaire philanthropists think t
For doubters of development aid, how about some good news for a change?
If you were at the Science Museum in London on Monday night, you would have heard a lot of success stories from Bill and Melinda Gates.
The American billionaire philanthropists think there have been too many negative stories that ignore the benefits they believe aid brings to the lives of the world's poorest.
"When money is spent wisely, it saves lives, it improves livelihoods and it builds prosperous societies. Bill and I think when you find a leverage point that is this powerful, you should take advantage of it. When we find a way to save millions of lives, we should do more of it. When find a way to improve hundreds of millions of lives, we should give it all we've got," Melinda Gates told an audience of development experts, academics and celebrities.
"So when it comes to development we are both optimists."
The couple are spreading the word through "Living Proof", a campaign to "bust the myths" and highlight what they consider is working well in development.
Taking it in turns to speak, they pressed home their point with slick graphs, photos and video of successful vaccination, maternal health and agricultural programmes from Nicaragua to Ethiopia and Tanzania.
Melinda Gates said that, since 2003, Ethiopia has opened 15,000 remote healthcare clinics and trained 35,000 healthcare workers. The number of mothers who have received two prenatal visits has doubled since 2000, as has the percentage of immunised children.
Bill Gates said 300 million Africans who depend on maize are going to get new varieties that are drought-resistant and will boost productivity.
"We take new seeds for maize and other crops, plus other new tools - micro-irrigation...better fertiliser supply. The opportunity with the investments that are being made is that we can cut hunger in half in Africa by 2020," he said.
MEASURING IMPACT
The phrase "smart aid" was repeated time and again.
"We're getting a lot smarter about this development aid. We're much more focused on results. We're more focused on measuring the impact of what these dollars are getting and we're more coordinated," Melinda Gates said.
She attempted to address concerns about misused and mismanaged development assistance, dismissing it largely as a relic of the Cold War era in which superpowers used aid to "curry favour".
Yet just a day after the Gates' presentation, Human Rights Watch issued a 105-page report accusing the government of Ethiopia, one of the biggest recipients of foreign aid in the world, of using development aid to suppress political dissent.
The U.S.-based rights group says it has documented cases of opposition supporters in rural areas being denied emergency food aid and access to a long-running, food-for-work scheme that caters to more than 7 million people.
There's no doubt the Gateses believe things have changed, and that donors are now better at tracking spending and measuring its impact. But it may prove hard to win over the sceptics.
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