Why is it that the West’s attempts to help the poor fail year after year? There are no easy answers to this question, but Easterly, with a very sharp pen, suggests that the aid institutions need to step out of their traditional patterns and change their mentality from what the author calls “planners” into “searchers.”  The book opens with a terribly familiar image that I too have encountered in Ethiopia. Amaretch, a small Ethiopian girl, is too poor to go to school and carries firewood to help her family: 

Amaretch – A snapshot from The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly:  

“I am driving out of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to the countryside. An endless line of women and girls is marching in the opposite direction, into the city. They range in age from nine to fifty-nine. Each one is bent nearly double under the load of firewood. The heavy loads propel them forward almost at a trot. I think of slaves driven along by an invisible slave driver. They are carrying the firewood from miles outside of Addis Ababa, where there are eucalyptus forests, and across the denuded lands encircling the city. The women bring the wood to the main city market, where they will sell it for a couple of dollars. That will be it for their day’s income, as it takes all day for them to heft firewood into Addis and to walk back.” 

The rest of this snapshot and the entire first chapter of Easterly’s book are available online here