All Articles

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?

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.

Drawing on five decades of work across more than 35 countries, Benny explains why conventional economic thinking so often fails to reflect life in the poorest communities.

Climate pressure, soil exhaustion, water scarcity and unequal markets are reshaping food production. The future depends on practical choices made with farmers, not for them.

The language of saving Africa places outsiders at the centre. What changes when communities define the problem, lead the response and decide what progress means?

Reparations raise profound questions about history, wealth and responsibility. This article considers what meaningful repair could look like beyond symbolism and political rhetoric.

Trillions have been spent in the name of development, yet poverty and hunger persist. The question is not whether the world has given enough, but how the system uses what it gives.

A major report may acknowledge global poverty while relying on familiar assumptions. Benny asks whether respected institutions are diagnosing the system or simply repeating it.