Over at Open Democracy a long and learned piece by Roger Riddell on the impact of Development Aid: a board member of Oxford Policy Management, a Principal of The Policy Practice and a member of DFID’s the Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact (IACDI).

This mighty analysis explores at length whether the question "Is Aid Working?" is really the right question.

It finally comes to what looks to me like a sensible conclusion: that the systemic problems of international aid will not be addressed until …

… those running aid agencies agree among themselves to devote far less energy and far fewer resources to defending aid by providing evidence of their own agencies’ successes and instead channel far more energy into highlighting aid’s systemic failures and weaknesses and into urging that they be addressed.

If such leaders believe there is a moral reason to provide aid, they should be leading the campaign to address aid’s systemic problems. This, in my view, is where the discourse on aid should be focused.

Well, quite so.

But just a thought.

If the problem is that people are poor and so need inefficient Aid, maybe there should be some hard focus on the tried and proven way to lift people out of poverty?

This article is, according to Word Count 4661 words long.

In it the words/phrases business, freedom, private sector do not appear once.

Why not?

Isn’t that the right Aid question?