Why read Lords of Poverty?

Book cover of Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business

Book description

Each year some sixty billion dollars are spent on foreign aid throughout the world. Whether in donations to charities such as Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE, UNICEF, or the Red Cross, in the form of enormous loans from the World Bank, or as direct payments from one government to another,…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Lords of Poverty as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Anna Simons

Author

Yes, this is the same Graham Hancock who now writes contrarian archeological tomes. I conducted some of my PhD fieldwork in the same area of Somalia that he visited as a reporter, and I was there not long after he was in the 1980s.

This was the first book I came across that explained why almost every development project I’d encountered when traveling around Africa seemed to be such a waste, or worse. Next to no one at the time was reporting on the corruption generated by ‘development’ or the extent to which aid was an industry. Hancock nailed it.

From Anna's list on understand why our foreign policy fails often.

Esther Hertzog

Author

I "discovered" Hancock's book by coincidence in the summer of 2000, when I stayed in Oxford.

While working on my book I met a scholar who recommended me the book when he learned about my study. He thought that Hancock's book could offer me some exciting insights. Reading the book was overwhelming for me, as I found out that my "Nepali experience" in the context of a women's development project was not exceptional.

I realized then that my critical analysis gained further evidence, through elaborating on Hancock's numerous examples from other places where the World Bank and Western Capitalist agencies…

From Esther's list on bureaucracy and state power.