Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa

by Kim Yi Dionne

Between 2002 and 2013, bilateral donors spent over $64 billion on AIDS intervention in low- and middle-income countries. During the same period, nearly 25 million died of AIDS and more than 32 million were newly infected with HIV. In this book for students of political economy and public policy in Africa, as well as global health, Kim Yi Dionne tries to understand why AIDS interventions in Africa often fail. The fight against AIDS requires the coordination of multiple actors across borders and levels of governance in highly affected countries, and these actors can be the primary sources of the problem. Dionne observes misaligned priorities along the global chain of actors, and argues this misalignment can create multiple opportunities for failure. Analyzing foreign aid flows and public opinion polls, Dionne shows that while the international community highly prioritizes AIDS, ordinary Africans view AIDS as but one of the many problems they face daily.

Genres: Africa

208 pages, Paperback

Published December 7, 2017

About the author

Kim Yi Dionne is an Associate Professor of Political Science at UC Riverside, where she teaches courses on African politics. She is also an editor of The Monkey Cage, a blog on politics and political science at The Washington Post. Her research focuses on African politics, particularly interventions to improve the human condition, public opinion, and political behavior. She is the author of Doomed Interventions: The Failure of Global Responses to AIDS in Africa (Cambridge University Press 2018). She collected much of the data for her book in Malawi, where she was a Fulbright Fellow from 2008-2009. Her more recent research uses experimental methods, including lab-in-the-field experiments in Malawi and a randomized controlled trial in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She received her Ph.D. from UCLA, where she was a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellow in Swahili. She held previous faculty appointments at Smith College and Texas A&M University.