Melinda Gates on Why Foreign Aid Still Matters
The cover of the May 2000 issue of The Economist featured an Africa-shaped photo cutout with a young, armed man popping out of it. “The Hopeless Continent,” the magazine deemed it, asking, “Does Africa have some inherent character flaw that keeps it backward and incapable of development?”
Today, few would write off Africa—or developing nations on any continent—as hopeless. Instead, the health of the developing world has been very much a story of hope. Since 2000, new malaria infections have halved in sub-Saharan Africa. Child mortality and AIDS deaths have fallen precipitously. Between the 1870s and the 1970s, famines killed about a million people per year around the world. Since 1980, that number has gone down to an average of about 75,000 annually. (Indeed, in 2011 even , publishing a new cover story titled “Africa Rising.”)
