Welcome. This is Anastasia Yuglova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

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Ugandan journalist Andrew Wende spoke to an audience here at Cato on Wednesday to explain why

he believed that foreign aid only exacerbates Africa's problems instead of alleviating them.

Aside from editing the politics section in the daily monitor, a newspaper in Kampala, Uganda,

he also works as a research fellow at Stanford University. Andrew is author of the Cato study Foreign Aid and the Weakening of Democratic Accountability in Uganda.

He is our guest today.

Andrew, can you walk me through a brief history of aid in Africa?

Well, since 1960. Can you walk me through a brief history of aid in Africa?

Well, since 1960, when most African countries got independence, Africa has received nearly

six hundred billion dollars of aid yet that continent has been growing poorer not richer.

Initially aid was given to finance industrial projects building factories and roads and dams. That did not improve the economic

situation on the continent. Donors changed and started giving aid to finance policy reform, privatization, liberalization, governments deliberately

sabotaged the reform effort and the continent continued to grow poorer. Now aid is being given for poverty reduction

to finance education, health, infrastructure, but the situation is not getting

better, it's getting worse.

So the first intuition you get from that experience

is that aid does not bring about economic advancement.

But the second suspicion you get is that aid could

actually be one of the factors contributing to bad governance and economic

stagnation. Well that may be true but aid doesn't actually get into the hands of those who need it.

...