Dambisa Moyo

Everyone in these Haiti meetings in Miami, Washington, and New York has a heart for the poor, but do they also have a mind for the poor?

The rescue of the bottom billion is only a reality if Mr. Sachs and Mr. Easterly put their outstanding intellectual skills to work instead of trying to win a debate that academics will perpetuate so long as they exist.

Poverty in Africa will be eliminated not by aid, but by entrepreneurial job creation, by real entrepreneurs creating scalable enterprises that will ultimately create millions of jobs.

Go ahead and call me a misguided Westerner if you like, or even a bleeding heart; I much prefer those titles to "bystander" -- innocent or not.

Sachs is an inspirational and hard-working intellectual, just one whose ideas on Africa happen to be sometimes totally wrong, and other times only seriously wrong.

The aid interventions that Mr. Sachs lauds as evidence of success are merely band aid solutions that do nothing to lift Africa out of the mire -- leaving the continent alive but half drowning.

Jeffrey Sachs, the world's leading apologist and fundraiser for the aid establishment, has written a ferocious personal attack on me in his HuffPost blog, "Aid Ironies." Allow me to defend myself.

Rich people have an uncanny ability to oppose aid for everybody but themselves.

The argument that aid isn't working is gathering global momentum. But we should be wary of the analysis offered in Dambisa Moyo's influential new book, Dead Aid.

Calling aid "dead" may sell books, but it does little to further the real debate. Too much is at stake for oversimplification. It's really her premise that should be dead on arrival.

In addition to killing the aid program, Dambisa Moyo prescribes free-market policies such as delving into the capital markets and creative financing such as micro-finance.

Dambisa Moyo's book, Dead Aid, takes the approach of lumping together all of Africa's 50 years of post colonial history and its troubles and blaming it on only one thing -- Western aid.