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Is Foreign Aid Harming Africa?

By: NPR/TED Staff
June 29, 2012
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Part 3 of TED Radio Hour episode Africa: The Next Chapter. You can watch Andrew Mwenda's full Ted Talk, A New Look At Africa, at TED.com.

About Andrew Mwenda's Talk

In this provocative talk, journalist Andrew Mwenda asks us to re-frame the "African question" — to look beyond the media's stories of poverty, civil war and helplessness and see the opportunities for creating wealth and happiness throughout the continent.

About Andrew Mwenda

Andrew Mwenda is a print, radio and television journalist, and an active critic of many forms of Western aid to Africa. Too much of the aid from rich nations, he says, goes to the worst African countries to fuel war and government abuse. Such money not only never gets to its intended recipients, Africa's truly needy — it actively plays a part in making their lives worse.

Mwenda worked at the Daily Monitor newspaper in Kampala starting in the mid-1990s, and hosted a radio show, Andrew Mwenda Live, since 2001. In 2005, he was charged with sedition by the Ugandan government for criticizing the president of Uganda in the wake of the helicopter crash that killed the vice president of Sudan. He has produced documentaries and commentary for the BBC on the dangers of aid and debt relief to Africa, consulted for the World Bank and Transparency International, and was a Knight Fellow at Stanford in 2007. In December 2007, he launched a new newspaper in Kampala, The Independent, a leading source of uncensored news in the country.

Mwenda also maintains a blog and you can follow him on Twitter.

Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

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