Aid & Power

Bill Gates has set ambitious goals for Africa. Benny Dembitzer asks whether another top-down aid programme can succeed without understanding how poverty is experienced on the ground.

Big international NGOs were created to challenge injustice. Have scale, bureaucracy and dependence on institutional funding pulled them away from the people they claim to serve?

Médecins Sans Frontières commands enormous public trust and significant resources. This article asks difficult questions about how effectively that strength is being used.

Development policy often treats countries as coherent nations. In reality, borders, identities and local loyalties can make governance and outside intervention far more complicated.

Lasting development begins with the realities facing farmers, workers and communities, not with grand strategies designed far away. The base must shape the solution.

Small, locally rooted projects can see needs clearly, adapt quickly and remain accountable. Their success challenges the assumption that bigger aid programmes achieve more.

Donors are encouraged to give, but rarely shown the full journey of their money. This article follows the systems, costs and decisions between a donation and its intended recipient.

The people most affected by poverty are often missing from the data used to describe it. If the numbers are incomplete, how reliable are the policies built upon them?