Nigeria’s economic woes and the doctrine of odious debt

Nigerian historian Femi Eseku makes an eloquent and compelling argument for establishing stricter conditions for receiving aid in order to end the cycle of odious debts perpetuated by what he calls "carnivorous economic saboteurs, disguised as international donor agencies and their greedy oligarchic African recipients."

World Bank lending programme suffers from “material weaknesses” in responding to fraud and corruption

(April 23, 2009) A report on the internal controls of the World Bank’s US $40 billion International Development Association (IDA) has found the current procedures for identifying and preventing fraudulent or corrupt use of aid money to be woefully inadequate. The report is the first of its kind to be done by any international development finance institution.

Moyo’s “Dead Aid” is dead on

Through our Odious Debts Online news service, Probe International has long critiqued and reported on the failures of the international multi-billion-dollar aid industry to help the world’s poorest countries develop, instead creating a cycle of dependency and stagnation. Economist Dambisa Moyo in Dead Aid comes to the same conclusion

Three Gorges dam faces 14.5-billion-dollar cost overrun

(April 16, 2009) China’s Three Gorges Dam, due to be completed in November, is getting bigger every day on all fronts. While officially the government said it has spent 180 billion yuan (26.35 billion dollars) on building the 185-metre dam and a reservoir stretching more than 600 kilometres, local critics and foreign observers said the real figure could be more than twice that amount, and that’s just in the construction phase.