Great talk, important stuff.

Moving this video to NetRunner's personal queue. It failed to receive enough votes to get sifted up to the front page within 2 days.

*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued - promote requested by original submitter NetRunner.

I usually love TED, but you can't have a substantial conversation about aid and its efficacy or lack thereof if you aren't willing to engage in serious and critical political discourse. Unfortunately TED has always been too politically correct for its own good, but when you look at their trailing list of corporate sponsors how can you be surprised.

Hmmm, lentils, bed nets, immunization . . . what about the context that all these aid measures take place in? Africa is not some generic entity to be pitied. As an 'African' a South African more specifically, I get seriously annoyed by the disingenuous way in which 'African' issues are constantly portrayed and inevitably lugged together. Just trying to get a basic inkling on the poverty and aid issues underpinned by the social, economic and political fabric that exists in South Africa alone would take an incredible amount of time and is VERY specific.

Just learning about and trying to understand my own country has been consuming enough and truthfully I only have a basic handle on a few others like Cote D'ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Botswana and Nigeria. All have an incredibly diverse and complex set of problems and they will never be addressed by grouping them together as if inflicted with some kind of 'generalised poverty disorder' that you can throw a pill at.

Pointing to the success of small scale village based social programs as some kind of science based platform for understanding and eradicating poverty in Africa is, in my opinion, totally delusional. It wreaks of the ahistorical imperial anthropology of old.

If you are going to generalise and frame 'Africa's' problems, you have to have the courage to point fingers at some of the MANY corporations, banks, institutions and nations that so readily contribute towards the vast pools of misery found throughout this beautiful continent. Poverty is a complex bi-product of Africa's colonial history and the consequent exploitation and manipulation that has dogged the continent to this day. As long as the majority of the wealth of its nations is being siphoned off into foreign bank accounts there will be no solutions bearing any lasting impact.

@SpeveO, it's been a few days since I watched the video, but I kinda recall them saying at the end that the point with this isn't that these are the universal answers to these questions, so much as this kind of experimentation and review of resultant data is the way we should evaluate the most effective way to provide aid in whatever situation you're in.

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