Every student of African history is familiar with the recurring theme of well-intentioned white men visiting calamity on Africans. My interest in Africa began as a child. I have traveled the continent for six decades and met some of its most visionary leaders, including Tom Mboya, Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, and Nelson Mandela. These anticolonial leaders understood that poverty is a complex conspiracy of social, historical, political, institutional, and technical maladies. It is most often best addressed through small-scale, locally tailored, trial-and-error experimentation. The optimal
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How poverty programs in Africa should work -- bottoms up
