Reddit mentions of The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development (No-Nonsense Guides)

You're in a unique position to really help, as a foreign-educated Tanzanian.

My dad's Tanzanian, and I've spent the last 5 years of my life working in African economic development -- and I have some cautions and advice from what I saw.

You'll probably remember why children dying was an accepted part of life. Why do people die of dysentery when they know they should drink clean water? Well, it's hard to prioritise that over other forms of survival when survival costs so much time. One family I met kept their money for typhoid medicine to keep their aunty alive, so chose not to buy clean water or firewood for boiling. So we see the smart child gets to go to school while the others work, and that kind of thing. The problem is that as long as families can't earn more, they can't afford the things that save them time, which keeps them poor. But if they can start to make even a bit more money, their priorities change.

First, it's not about how much money. There are lots of good arguments against charities and development money. The over-simplified version is that the development industry prevents the rise of more economically-sustainable answers to rise. There are lots of good books on this. Dead Aid, The Idealist - or the more matter-of-fact (and short) book by Maggie Black called The No Nonesense Guide to International Development https://www.amazon.com/No-Nonsense-Guide-International-Development-Guides/dp/1904456634 . For example, as long as clothes and toilet paper are imported for free, nobody local can start their own businesses making those. So we see how there are almost no factories in Africa, just exporting raw material. But now, Tanzania's economy is on the rise. You can look at World Bank data, or even the new skyscrapers on the Dar skyline. Things are changing for the better!

There are lots of lovely people doing different programs, but somehow after decades they've proven not to solve the problems:

- Foreign-government funded keep aid-dependence going
- Charity-funded focus on fund-raising and become machines that are ineffective on the ground
- Religious-funded programs tend to spur religious divides (particularly Christian/Muslim, which is a very different difference in East Africa than the US.)
- There's even a term called the "White Saviour Complex" - describing the industry serving foreign people who want to come "to save Africa." It's sad, but it's a form of tourism designed to make the customer, the foreigner, feel they are a good person. But what they do tends to not be sustainable, and the industry just focuses on people using social media to market their volunteering opportunity to more donors.

But you're an educated data scientist, and there are a lot of people, local Tanzanians who don't belong to these programs, who you could help.

I'd suggest you get a on plane, visit your old school, your old friends for a few weeks, and look around. It sounds so simple, but that's also what worked for me. (I can even make some introductions to young entrepreneurs in sanitation, clean water, energy if you want.)

And one person I think you'd love to get to know: TMS Ruge, a Ugandan who went to school in Canada and the US and came back to start a bunch of great businesses. Check out tmsruge.com and hit him up.

You may also want to look at some of the authors listed here, at structuralist theory generally (though it is not explicitly Marxist), and at the Singer-Prebisch thesis. The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development, if you can get it before the debate, is also great for providing statistics etc. (it's not really explicitly anti-capitalist either).

EDIT: Though I must add that ISI and structuralist economics more generally are seen as discredited or at the very least generating certain kinds of crises within the framework of bourgeoisie economics.