How effective is aid?

There are plenty of success stories that testify to the effectiveness of aid in saving the lives of poor people, particularly those suffering from diseases; for example in Morocco, cases of blinding trachoma—a bacterial eye infection—have fallen 75% since 1999 thanks to a massive donation of antibiotics from a pharmaceutical company; in China, a World Bank loan financed a tuberculosis project which is now saving an estimated 30,000 lives per year; and in Uganda and Malawi, anti-retroviral drugs issued by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria have kept hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS sufferers alive since 2001 who would otherwise have died. However, there are many cases where aid has not reached its intended target, or has been hampered by poor planning, corrupt governments in recipient countries or war. In 2007, the fighting in southern Afghanistan made it too dangerous for DFID to deliver much-needed food aid to thousands of starving people, which only increased local support for the Taleban insurgents. Beyond the effectiveness of delivering food or medicine, the effectiveness of development aid is difficult to measure and is a matter of some controversy.

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