The new aid giants
Can the entrepreneurial zeal, innovation and super-size budgets of private foundations succeed where a sclerotic and undisciplined international aid industry has failed? Or is the “New Philanthropy” simply executive arrogance, vanity and naïveté - rushing in where even the "aid experts" have failed?
Economist Jeffery Sachs believes the world's 2015 millennium development goal (MDG) targets could be met with a budget of US$150 billion a year. “Our governments are not acting. People are dying,” he claims. Rather than looking to the G8, Sachs points to the Forbes Rich List as the best potential source of the cash. Just 5 percent, Sachs says, of the income of the world's 950 dollar billionaires would easily raise the funds.
Others demur. “The problems we face in reducing poverty and disease and other issues are not about money,” warns Randolph Kent, director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King's College, University of London. “Indeed, there is a strong danger that if more money is thrown at the problems we will see an increase of problems and not the solutions.”
