Reflection on Foreign Aid and Poverty

Reading Reflection
Name
Institution
Reading Reflection
The theme for this week's reading is foreign aid, analyzing whether foreign aid is helping or causing more problems. The first argument is that food aid is being used as a weapon against people that require it. Instead of food aid helping to alleviate famine, it brings about internal violence or civil wars. Secondly, food aid does not solve food insecurity but is being used to fuel conflict.
Supporting evidence from countries such as South Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia shows that foreign aid has been detrimental to the people. Twenty million people starving from famine need assistance due to problems created by others (Duren,2018). Civil wars and internal violence are a result of misdirected food aid. In some regions, food aid is provided to everyone in the community instead of those that need it. The repercussion is that people become reliant on food. Thus instead of the aid offering a long-term solution, it becomes a temporary one. The food is usually looted and blocked from reaching its intended people, thus creating more conflict.
International governments and agencies have always been quick to step up and offer foreign aid to countries that need it. However, to evaluate the success of their aid, we must look at their impact and how their aid is helping to solve problems (Hobbes, 2015). Hobbes refutes that foreign aid is bringing in good results, but Sachs indicates that there is a success story associated with foreign aid. For instance, foreign aid has been instrumental in malaria control. The introduction of mass bed net distribution helped lower the number of malaria deaths in Kenya in 2008, which helped cement the notion that foreign aid can be used for a worthy cause (Sachs, 2014). For aid to be successful, key stakeholders need to be involved.
There are many contradictions to this week's reading. At the same time, there is supporting evidence from Duren that food aid is detrimental to Africa. Sachs disagrees with this statement, indicating that foreign aid is a development tool that works best with transparency, economic policies, effective deployment of technologies, and good governance.
The second theme for this week's theory is poverty. Lack of education, health, and employment opportunities expose many households to poverty. Many people in the poverty bracket hav...