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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.

Every intermediary in aid can explain why it exists. Far fewer can explain what it costs, what power it keeps and when it will stop being needed. Money intended for people living in poverty rarely travels directly from a donor to a local organisation. It moves through governments, multilateral agencies, international NGOs, contractors, consultants and national partners before reaching the people closest to the problem. Each layer has a justification. Together, those layers ca

People sometimes hear my criticism of international aid and assume I want the large NGOs abolished. I do not. When an earthquake destroys a city, when war cuts families off from food, when floods contaminate water supplies, large humanitarian organisations can move people, money and supplies at a scale that local groups may not yet be equipped to manage. Their staff often work in dangerous conditions. Many are local staff serving their own communities. Walking away from that

More than a thousand aid workers have been killed in the past three years. Almost all of them were local people, serving their own communities. That should change how we think about all of it.

At a recent Development Assistance Committee meeting in Paris, I sat through two plenary sessions on “rewiring aid.” Not once was there a reference to how effectively aid actually reaches the grassroots, where hunger takes its toll. Two round table discussions followed. Same result. I raised a simple point: while the room debated shifting aid priorities to suit the geopolitical interests of the North, 35,000 to 40,000 people were dying of starvation that day, and every day. I

The most interesting argument in development is not whether the system works. It is what to do about the fact that it doesn't.

Benny Dembitzer went to the OECD's conference on the future of development cooperation. He came back with one observation about power, and about who was missing from the room.

Real Aid. Real Conversations.

STARVATION IS INCREASING IN THE WORLD’S POOREST COUNTRIES, MOST OF THEM IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Vast sums have been committed to ending poverty, but outcomes remain painfully limited. Following the money reveals who controls it, where it is absorbed and who is overlooked.