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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.

On average, 125 people a day die in the USA as a result of gun shootings, the majority (about 60%) being suicides. That's 46,000 deaths a year. Another 40,000 a year die in US road accidents. In the UK, every two days a woman is murdered, most likely by someone she knows. But, apart from those directly affected, no one seems to take much notice. It's the same with starvation, which worldwide kills more than 30,000 people, each and every day. The news media don't report it bec

We are often told that our Western system for making political choices, what we call democracy, is the best in the world, with the implication that if every nation adopted it many of the world's problems would be solved, or at least made less bad. Every country, we assume, aspires to copy that system because they want the level of individual rights and freedom we have. After all, in the UK, Churchill told us: 'democracy is the least bad form of government, after you have trie

In March 2025, Professor Josias Lang-Ritter, a researcher at the University of Aalto in Finland, published his report on a seminal study in which he and his colleagues seriously disputed the way in which data on rural populations across the world were being worked out. He and his colleagues had done their own calculations to estimate the numbers of people in about 300 rural communities in various parts of the world – and their figures were substantially different to those pub

Every day I discover in my inbox some news about another grand meeting which the elites of the world have attended or where a great person, totally unknown by anyone except his close family (you may call them a 'household name'!) has been feted. I find it increasingly annoying to read about some international high-level global meeting of some totally unknown group of people who have given themselves the right to "devote" their time and energy to changing the world's framework

Different people will have different ideas as to why there is so much starvation across the only part of the world where there is – in theory – space for expansion of food, not just for local people but for the entire planet. Unless we look at the challenges from the very base, from the point of view of the farmer, we will never be able to help them escape their several predicaments. Production of food has fallen over the last few decades because of rapid climate change. The

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?

Behind everyday food and commodity markets lie unequal relationships between producers, traders and consumers. The true cost is often carried by producers and communities with the least bargaining power.

Benny Dembitzer witnessed the Ethiopian famine response firsthand. Four decades later, he reflects on what Band Aid changed, what it missed and why hunger persists.

Industrialisation is routinely presented as the route to prosperity. But can the poorest countries follow a model built in another era, under entirely different conditions?

Growth strategies often repeat the same prescription: manufacture, export and compete. This article explores why economies may need routes shaped by their own resources and realities.

Corruption in poorer countries is frequently condemned without examining who enables it. Benny distinguishes need from greed and asks where power and responsibility truly sit.

Emergency relief can save lives, but it cannot replace long-term development. Communities need the power, resources and stability to build beyond repeated crisis response.