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Can I say how delighted I am to be away from the calm of Westminster and Whitehall?

This is Kim, a nine-year-old Vietnam girl, her back ruined by napalm, and she awakened the conscience of the nation of America to begin to end the Vietnam War. This is Birhan, who was the Ethiopian girl who launched Live Aid in the 1980s, 15 minutes away from death when she was rescued, and that picture of her being rescued is one that went round the world. This is Tiananmen Square. A man before a tank became a picture that became a symbol, for the whole world, of resistance. This next is the Sudanese girl, a few moments from death, a vulture hovering in the background, a picture that went round the world and shocked people into action on poverty. This is Neda, the Iranian girl who was shot while at a demonstration with her father in Iran only a few weeks ago, and she is now the focus, rightly so, of the YouTube generation.

And what do all these pictures and events have in common? What they have in common is what we see unlocked and what we cannot see. What we see unlocked: the invisible ties and bonds of sympathy that bring us together to become a human community. What these pictures demonstrate is that we do feel the pain of others, however distantly. What I think these pictures demonstrate is that we do believe in something bigger than ourselves. What these pictures demonstrate is that there is a moral sense across all religions, across all faiths, across all continents — a moral sense that not only do we share the pain of others, and believe in something bigger than ourselves but we have a duty to act when we see things that are wrong that need righted, see injuries that need to be corrected, see problems that need to be rectified.

There is a story about Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, going to see Ronald Reagan in America in the 1980s. Before he arrived Ronald Reagan said — and he was the Swedish Social Democratic Prime Minister — “Isn’t this man a communist?” The reply was, “No, Mr President, he’s an anti-communist.” And Ronald Reagan said, “I don’t care what kind of communist he is!” (Laughter) Ronald Reagan asked Olof Palme, the Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, “Well, what do you believe in? Do you want to abolish the rich?” He said, “No, I want to abolish the poor.” Our responsibility is to let everyone have the chance to realize their potential to the full.

I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what’s new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society.

Go back 200 years when the slave trade was under pressure from William Wilberforce and all the protesters. They protested across Britain. They won public opinion over a long period of time. But it took 24 years for the campaign to be successful. What could they have done with the pictures they could have shown if they were able to use the modern means of communication to win people’s hearts and minds?

Or if you take Eglantyne Jebb, the woman who created Save the Children 90 years ago. She was so appalled by what was happening in Austria as a result of the First World War and what was happening to children who were part of the defeated families of Austria, that in Britain she wanted to take action, but she had to go house to house, leaflet to leaflet, to get people to attend a rally in the Royal Albert Hall that eventually gave birth to Save the Children, an international organization that is now fully recognized as one of the great institutions in our land and in the world. But what more could she have done if she’d had the modern means of communications available to her to create a sense that the injustice that people saw had to be acted upon immediately?

Now look at what’s happened in the last 10 years. In Philippines in 2001, President Estrada — a million people texted each other about the corruption of that regime, eventually brought it down and it was, of course, called the “coup de text.” Then you have in Zimbabwe the first election under Robert Mugabe a year ago. Because people were able to take mobile-phone photographs of what was happening at the polling stations, it was impossible for that Premier to fix that election in the way that he wanted to do. Or take Burma and the monks that were blogging out, a country that nobody knew anything that was happening until these blogs told the world that there was a repression, meaning that lives were being lost and people were being persecuted and Aung San Suu Kyi, who is one of the great prisoners of conscience of the world, had to be listened to. Then take Iran itself, and what people are doing today, following what happened to Neda, people who are preventing the security services of Iran finding those people who are blogging out of Iran, changing their address to Tehran, Iran, and making it difficult for the security services.

Take, therefore, what modern technology is capable of: the power of our moral sense allied to the power of communications and our ability to organize internationally.

That, in my view, gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world. Foreign policy can never be the same again. It cannot be run by elites; it’s got to be run by listening to the public opinions of peoples who are blogging, who are communicating with each other around the world. 200 years ago the problem we had to solve was slavery. 150 years ago I suppose the main problem in a country like ours was how young people, children, had the right to education. 100 years ago in most countries in Europe, the pressure was for the right to vote. 50 years ago the pressure was for the right to social security and welfare. In the last 50-60 years we have seen fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, apartheid, discrimination on the basis of sex and gender and sexuality; all these have come under pressure because of the campaigns by people to change the world.

I was with Nelson Mandela a year ago when he was in London. I was at a concert that he was attending to mark his birthday and for the creation of new resources for his foundation. I was sitting next to Nelson Mandela — I was very privileged to do so — when Amy Winehouse came onto the stage and Nelson Mandela was quite surprised at the appearance of the singer and I was explaining to him at the time who she was. Amy Winehouse said, “Nelson Mandela and I have a lot in common. My husband too has spent a long time in prison.” (Laughter) Nelson Mandela then went down to the stage and he summarized the challenge for us all. He said in his lifetime he had climbed a great mountain, the mountain of challenging and then defeating racial oppression and defeating apartheid. He said that there was a greater challenge ahead, the challenge of poverty, of climate change, global challenges that needed global solutions and needed the creation of a truly global society.

We are the first generation that is in a position to do this. Combine the power of a global ethic with the power of our ability to communicate and organize globally with the challenges that we now face, most of which are global in their nature. Climate change cannot be solved in one country but has got to be solved by the world working together. A financial crisis, just as we have seen, could not be solved by America alone or Europe alone; it needed the world to work together. Take the problems of security and terrorism and, equally, the problem of human rights and development: they cannot be solved by Africa alone; they cannot be solved by America or Europe alone. We cannot solve these problems unless we work together.

So the great project of our generation, it seems to me, is to build for the first time out of a global ethic and our global ability to communicate and organize together, a truly global society, built on that ethic but with institutions that can serve that global society and make for a different future. We have now, and are the first generation with, the power to do this. Take climate change. Is it not absolutely scandalous that we have a situation where we know that there is a climate change problem, where we know also that that will mean we have to give more resources to the poorest countries to deal with that, when we want to create a global carbon market, but there is no global institution that people have been able to agree upon to deal with this problem? One of the things that has to come out of Copenhagen in the next few months is an agreement that there will be a global environmental institution that is able to deal with the problems of persuading the whole of the world to move along a climate-change agenda.

(Applause)

One of the reasons why an institution is not in itself enough is that we have to persuade people around the world to change their behavior as well, so you need that global ethic of fairness and responsibility across the generations. Take the financial crisis. If people in poorer countries can be hit by a crisis that starts in New York or starts in the sub-prime market of the United States of America. If people can find that that sub-prime product has been transferred across nations many, many times until it ends up in banks in Iceland or the rest in Britain, and people’s ordinary savings are affected by it, then you cannot rely on a system of national supervision. You need in the long run for stability, for economic growth, for jobs, as well as for financial stability, global economic institutions that make sure that growth to be sustained has to be shared, and are built on the principle that the prosperity of this world is indivisible.

So another challenge for our generation is to create global institutions that reflect our ideas of fairness and responsibility, not the ideas that were the basis of the last stage of financial development over these recent years. Then take development and take the partnership we need between our countries and the rest of the world, the poorest part of the world. We do not have the basis of a proper partnership for the future, and yet, out of people’s desire for a global ethic and a global society that can be done.

I have just been talking to the President of Sierra Leone. This is a country of six and a half million people, but it has only 80 doctors, it has 200 nurses, it has 120 midwives. You cannot begin to build a healthcare system for six million people with such limited resources.

Or take the girl I met when I was in Tanzania, a girl called Miriam. She was 11 years old, her parents had both died from AIDS, her mother and then her father. She was an AIDS orphan being handed across different extended families to be cared for. She herself was suffering from HIV, she was suffering from tuberculosis. I met her in a field, she was ragged, she had no shoes. When you looked in her eyes, any girl at the age of eleven is looking forward to the future, but there was an unreachable sadness in that girl’s eyes and if I could have translated that to the rest of the world for that moment, I believe that all the work that it had done for the global HIV/AIDS fund would be rewarded by people prepared to make donations.

We must then build a proper relationship between the richest and the poorest countries based on our desire that they are able to fend for themselves with the investment that is necessary in their agriculture, so that Africa is not a net importer of food, but an exporter of food.

Take the problems of human rights and the problems of security in so many countries around the world. Burma is in chains, Zimbabwe is a human tragedy, in Sudan thousands of people have died unnecessarily for wars that we could prevent. In the Rwanda Children’s Museum, there is a photograph of a 10-year-old boy and the Children’s Museum is commemorating the lives that were lost in the Rwandan genocide where a million people died.

There is a photograph of a boy called David. Beside that photograph there is the information about his life. It said “David, age 10.” David: ambition to be a doctor. Favorite sport: football. What did he enjoy most? Making people laugh. How did he die? Tortured to death. Last words said to his mother who was also tortured to death: “Don’t worry. The United Nations are coming.” And we never did.

And that young boy believed our promises that we would help people in difficulty in Rwanda, and we never did.

So we have got to create in this world also institutions for peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, but also for reconstruction and security for some of the conflict-ridden states of the world. So my argument today is basically this. We have the means by which we could create a truly global society. The institutions of this global society can be created by our endeavors. That global ethic can infuse the fairness and responsibility that is necessary for these institutions to work, but we should not lose the chance in this generation, in this decade in particular, with President Obama in America, with other people working with us around the world, to create global institutions for the environment, and for finance, and for security and for development, that make sense of our responsibility to other peoples, our desire to bind the world together, and our need to tackle problems that everybody knows exist.

It is said that in Ancient Rome that when Cicero spoke to his audiences, people used to turn to each other and say about Cicero, “Great speech.” But it is said that in Ancient Greece when Demosthenes spoke to his audiences, people turned to each other and didn’t say “Great speech.” They said, “Let’s march.” We should be marching towards a global society. Thank you.

(Applause)

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Brown speaks of seeing an “unreachable sadness” in the eyes of Miriam, the HIV orphan in Tanzania. I have been amazed to hear the backlash to this talk. Upon reflection, I sense Brown’s talk is piercing an unreachable sadness in us. Do we dare dream humanity can actually reach where he is pointing.

Kenya directly invests money in constituencies through a Community Development Fund (CDF). While giving workshops in Karachuonyo Constituency, I noticed that the majority of CDF projects were unfinished. Viewing this from my investment mindset, I saw egregious abuses of capital.

One day, while looking at the four walls of a long-stalled classroom project, with a flash of clarity, I suddenly saw what the community saw, the patrons had not forgotten their village. Sure, the classroom was unusable, but that wasn’t the point. The four walls represented the village had not been forgotten by its elders [patrons]. Turns out, CDF monies are, in fact, a “Cake Distribution Fund.”

In Kenya, everyone wants to know their elders have included them in the distribution of rents/the sharing of the cake. Given they also know themselves as poor, little fish, they are happy with crumbs. Big Fish [elders] get to eat first. They can have as much as they want. When they are done eating, everyone else shares the leftovers.

Capitalists don’t get it about corruption. We don’t see it for what it is. When we do, we can get development done.

Time to turn off the aid tap?

Dambisa Moyo is to aid what Ayaan Hirsi Ali is to Islam. Here is an African woman, articulate, smart, glamorous, delivering a message of brazen political incorrectness: cut aid to Africa. Aid, she argues, has not merely failed to work; it has compounded Africa’s problems. Moyo cannot be dismissed as a crank. Educated at Harvard and Oxford, she heads the Africa strategy of a major bank. Nor can she be dismissed as a renegade who has rejected her roots. She is deeply wounded by the lack of development in Zambia, her home country. So what is she saying?

The first stage in her argument is that aid is easy money. If governments had to rely upon private financial markets they would become accountable to lenders, and if they had to rely upon taxation they would become accountable to voters. Aid is like oil, enabling powerful elites to embezzle public revenues. She catalogues evidence, both statistical and anecdotal.

But the core of her argument is that there is a better alternative. Governments could find money for development through financial markets, both international and domestic. Historically, the governments of those countries that have successfully developed funded investment by recourse to international markets. In order to borrow, they needed decent credit ratings; to get the ratings, they had to be transparent and prudent. The discipline of transparency and prudence were as important as the money in promoting development. Some of the stronger African governments have at last started down this road. She also sees huge scope for innovations in micro-finance, such as the group borrowing pioneered by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

What should we make of these arguments? As it happens I taught Moyo both at Harvard and Oxford, but her ideas are decidedly her own. I think that they deserve to be taken seriously. The function of aid is not to make us feel better about ourselves; it is to promote development, and if a well-informed African tells us that we are inadvertently having the opposite effect, we had better take heed.

So is there solid evidence to refute her claim that aid worsens governance and so impoverishes? Unfortunately, the research on whether aid is effective is frankly shambolic. At the level of an individual project we can often show it is effective, but this misses Moyo’s point: that what matters is the overall impact on the society.

There is indeed some evidence that aid tends to worsen governance, though whether enough to offset its beneficial effects is unresolved. Certainly, the evidence is sufficiently troubling that respected experts share her concerns. Adrian Wood, formerly chief economist of the Department for International Development, has argued that there should be a ceiling to aid as a proportion of the budget. The consensus academic view, to the extent there is one, is probably that large aid inflows, like large oil revenues, tend to reduce government accountability to citizens.

However, cutting aid may not be the best response. My preferred alternative is to strengthen its potential for “governance conditionality”: aid agencies should insist on both transparent budgeting and free and fair elections. That said, I have to admit that Moyo has a good retort. She shows how feeble aid agencies have been: when occasionally one gets tough, others compensate. Within aid agencies, performance is judged predominantly by short-term criteria such as how much aid is disbursed, rather than longer-term effects on accountability. Based on past behaviour, a government could assume that the aid would keep flowing more or less regardless of what it did.

However, even admitting the severe limits of donor ability to improve governance, I doubt that many of Africa’s problems can be attributed to aid. It is, in my view, something of a sideshow. Because it lends itself to a simple morality story of guilt and reparation, it receives more attention than is warranted. Paradoxically, despite her radically different argument, Moyo has ended up with the same punchline as the conventional, politically correct diagnosis: Africa’s problems are the consequence of our transgressions.

By the same token, I think that Moyo’s message is over-optimistic. She implies that, were aid cut, African governments would respond by turning to other sources of finance that would make them more accountable. I think this exaggerates the opportunity for alternative finance and underestimates the difficulties African societies face.

Moyo has been unlucky in her timing. In the brief interval between writing and publication, the book’s argument has been overtaken by events. The opportunity for African governments to raise money on international markets has evaporated even more rapidly than it opened around four years ago. The global financial crisis has drastically reduced investor appetites for risk: for example, the government of Kenya had planned to raise $500m through an international bond issue, but that is now out of the question.

International investors have over-reacted: in reality the investment opportunities in Africa have not deteriorated as sharply as those in the OECD, but irrational exuberance has been replaced by irrational caution. By chance, the collapse in private finance has coincided with a shift in donor priorities from social spending to infrastructure.

As a result of these two changes in mood, suddenly the aid agencies look to be more important as sources of finance for investment than at any time in the last two decades. While the commercial banks have stopped lending, the World Bank has never been as busy.

African societies face problems deeper than their dependence on aid. Divided by ethnic loyalties, they are too large to be nations. Yet with only tiny economies, they lack the scale to be effective states. As a result the vital public goods of security and accountability cannot adequately be provided. In their absence the valuable natural assets that many countries possess become liabilities instead of opportunities for prosperity.

I think that African societies need international help to overcome these problems; it is just that the help they need is not predominantly money. Aid is not a very potent instrument for enhancing either security or accountability. Our obsession with it has detracted from the more important ways in which we can promote development: peacekeeping, security guarantees, trade privileges, and governance.

But we must hope that Moyo’s thesis is right: Britain has just implemented the sharp cuts in aid that she wants to see. Although this was achieved inadvertently, as a result of the sharp depreciation of the pound rather than by a cut in the sterling-denominated budget, it will have the same effect.

Paul Collier is professor of economics at Oxford University and author of ‘The Bottom Billion’ (Oxford)

Rebel with a cause: Dambisa Moyo - A global economic strategist at the investment bank Goldman Sachs in London, Dambisa Moyo formerly worked as a consultant at the World Bank in Washington DC. She grew up in Lusaka, Zambia, and studied economics at Harvard University and then (for a doctorate) at Oxford. Kofi Annan has praised ‘Dead Aid’, her first book, as a “compelling case for a new approach to Africa”. Historian Niall Ferguson’s response to it was that “This reader was left wanting a lot more Moyo, and a lot less Bono”.

Good ideas are common - what’s uncommon are people who’ll work hard enough to bring them about.  — Ashleigh Brilliant (via affremblequotes)