Opinion: Philanthropic Billions Have Not Improved Africa

Novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux writes critically in a Barron’s magazine feature of the “telescopic philanthropy” of Western billionaires and celebrities that he says still dominates efforts to improve health, education, and living conditions in Africa.

Mr. Theroux, who has lived and traveled extensively in Africa, said that despite tens of billions of dollars a year in aid from foreign governments and philanthropic investment, “Africa is much worse off than when I first went there 50 years ago to teach English: poorer, sicker, less educated, and more badly governed. It seems that much of the aid has made things worse.”

Big donors’ “focus from afar to uplift the continent” has changed little since Victorian times, Mr. Theroux maintains. Amid occasional successes like the Clinton Foundation’s work to lower the cost of AIDS drugs in Africa, he says, most grand philanthropic schemes there fail because they do not take into account local needs, circumstances, customs, or corruption.