I tell this anecdote not just as an example of how aid often misses the point, but to illustrate a much larger truth. Poor countries don’t need our aid; they need us to stop impoverishing them. Until we target the structural drivers of global poverty – the underlying architecture of wealth extraction and accumulation – development efforts will continue to fail, decade after decade. We will continue to watch the poverty numbers rise, and the divide between rich and poor countries will continue to grow.
