It bubbles and writhes, it hisses with toxic breath like something that refuses to sleep. Every so often, it groans and squelches, with a guttural sound — the death rattle of a dragon, or the final gasp of a broken machine refusing to die. Two meters from our tent, yellow, foul-smelling sulfuric fumes rise rhythmically from a fissure in the earth. Now, sharp cracking sounds rip through the air —the unmistakable sound of stones being flung. For a breathless instant, we wonder: Perhaps… it’s not just the mountain exhaling. Perhaps the lava is moving toward us.
An Industry Faces Its Own Redundancy For those of us who have spent years in the aid business, often congratulating ourselves along the way, recent coverage in The Economist may make for rather uncomfortable reading. Three articles in its March 21 edition, “Open for Business,” “Get Paid, Not Aid,” and “Meet Africa’s Richest Man”, paint a picture of Africa as a continent which has fared rather well after significant aid cuts and whose future looks increasingly independent of us. One can almost hear the collective throat-clearing across conference rooms in Geneva, New York, and Nairobi. The implication, though, is difficult to ignore: Africa’s economic prospects may improve not because of aid, but despite it. This is awkward. Aid, after all, is not merely a policy tool; it is an industry, complete with career paths, reporting frameworks, and an ability to declare success regardless of outcomes. For decades, we have framed aid as indispensable. Without it, we implied, development would st...