Development Aid and Its Fate

"Your market share has fallen from 18% to 6% in a decade. Well-financed niche-players are moving in, threatening to appropriate the most exciting areas."
...
"Who, in these circumstances, would want to be in charge of global health at the World Bank?"
...
"Between 1997 and 2008 the bank provided $17 billion for government-run projects in the fields of health, nutrition and family planning."
...
"The evaluators’ criticism was not just that a third of the 220 projects under scrutiny had failed to achieve their goals, but that those goals were often misconceived. In particular, the bank’s remit is to end poverty, but that was the specific objective of only 6% of the projects and a subsidiary objective of only another 7%. Even where poverty reduction was a stated objective, little had been done to find out whether poverty had, in fact, been reduced. If there had been any investigation, it often failed to find any reduction.
There was criticism, too, of the fact that many projects were of a kind more likely to benefit the middle and upper classes which, in poor countries as in rich ones, are often better able to take advantage of infrastructure, such as new hospitals, which the bank helps to create."
...
"But in Africa three-quarters of projects were deemed not to be up to snuff."
...
"What the bank needs, in a crowded market, is a niche of its own, and it is trying to carve one out."


Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13579721&source=hptextfeature