Why foreign aid fails - and how to really help Africa
There just isn't the political will, in Britain or elsewhere, to really act on our analysis
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson 25 January 2014
The Spectator – thespectator.com
David Cameron speaks compellingly about international aid. Eradicating poverty, he says, means certain institutional
changes: rights for women and minorities, a free media and integrity in government. It means the freedom to participate in
society and have a say over how your country is run. We wholeheartedly agree and were flattered to see the Prime
Minister tell this magazine that he is ‘obsessed’ by our book on the subject, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power,
Prosperity, and Poverty. But diagnosing a problem is one thing; fixing it another. And we don’t yet see the political will
— in Britain or elsewhere — that could turn this analysis into a practical agenda.
The British government is strikingly generous in foreign aid donations. It spent £8.7 billion on foreign aid in 2012 —
which is 0.56 per cent of national income. This is to rise to £11.7 billion, or 0.7 per cent of national income, next year. But
if money alone were the solution we would be along the road not just to ameliorating the lives of poor people today but
ending poverty for ever.
Photo: Photothek via Getty Images
The idea that large donations can remedy poverty has dominated the theory of economic development — and the thinking
in many international aid agencies and governments — since the 1950s. And how have the results been? Not so good,
actually. Millions have moved out of abject poverty around the world over the past six decades, but that has had little to
do with foreign aid. Rather, it is due to economic growth in countries in Asia which received little aid. The World Bank
has calculated that between 1981 and 2010, the number of poor people in the world fell by about 700 million — and that
in China over the same period, the number of poor people fell by 627 million.
In the meantime, more than a quarter of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa are poorer now than in 1960 — with no sign
that foreign aid, however substantive, will end poverty there. Last year, perhaps the most striking illustration came from
Liberia, which has received massive amounts of aid for a decade. In 2011, according to the OECD, official development
aid to Liberia totalled $765 million, and made up 73 per cent of its gross national income. The sum was even larger in
2010. But last year every one of the 25,000 students who took the exam to enter the University of Liberia failed. All of the
aid is still failing to provide a decent education to Liberians.
One could imagine that many factors have kept sub-Saharan Africa poor — famines, civil wars. But huge aid flows appear
to have done little to change the development trajectories of poor countries, particularly in Africa. Why? As we spell out
in our book, this is not to do with a vicious circle of poverty, waiting to be broken by foreign money. Poverty is instead
created by economic institutions that systematically block the incentives and opportunities of poor people to make things
better for themselves, their neighbours and their country.
Let us take for Exhibit A the system of apartheid in South Africa, which Nelson Mandela dedicated himself to abolishing.
In essence, apartheid was a set of economic institutions — rules that governed what people could or could not do, their
opportunities and their incentives. In 1913, the South African government declared that 93 per cent of South Africa was
the ‘white economy’, while 7 per cent was for blacks (who constituted about 70 per cent of the population). Blacks had to
have a pass, a sort of internal passport, to travel to the white economy. They could not own property or start a business
there. By the 1920s the ‘Colour Bar’ banned blacks from undertaking any skilled or professional occupation. The only
jobs blacks could take in the white economy were as unskilled workers on farms, in mines or as servants for white people.
Such economic institutions, which we call ‘extractive’, sap the incentives and opportunities of the vast mass of the
population and thereby keep a society poor.
The people in poor countries have the same aspirations as those in rich countries — to have the same chances and
opportunities, good health care, clean running water in their homes and high-quality schools for their children. The
problem is that their aspirations are blocked today — as the aspirations of black people were in apartheid South Africa —
by extractive institutions. The poor don’t pull themselves out of poverty, because the basic ability to do so is denied them.
You could see this in the protests behind the Arab Spring: those in Cairo’s Tahrir Square spoke in one voice about the
corruption of the government, its inability to deliver public services and the lack of equality of opportunity. Poverty in
Egypt cannot be eradicated with a bit more aid. As the protestors recognised, the economic impediments they faced
stemmed from the way political power was exercised and monopolised by a narrow elite.
This is by no means a phenomenon confined to the Arab world. That the poor people in poor countries themselves
understand their predicament is well illustrated by the World Bank’s multi-country project ‘Voices of the Poor’. One
message that persistently comes across is that poor people feel powerless — as one person in Jamaica put it, ‘Poverty is
like living in jail, living under bondage, waiting to be free.’ Another from Nigeria put it like this: ‘If you want to do
something and have no power to do it, it is talauchi [poverty].’ Like black people in South Africa before 1994, poor
people are trapped within extractive economic institutions.
Photo: AFP/Getty
But it is not just the poor who are thus trapped. By throwing away a huge amount of potential talent and energy, the entire
society condemns itself to poverty.
The key to understanding and solving the problem of world poverty is to recognise not just that poverty is created and
sustained by extractive institutions — but to appreciate why the situation arises in the first place. Again, South Africa’s
experience is instructive. Apartheid was set up by whites for the benefit of whites. This happened because it was the
whites who monopolised political power, just as they did economic opportunities and resources. These monopolies
impoverished blacks and created probably the world’s most unequal country — but the system did allow whites to
become as prosperous as people in developed countries.
The logic of poverty is similar everywhere. To understand Syria’s enduring poverty, you could do worse than start with
the richest man in Syria, Rami Makhlouf. He is the cousin of President Bashar al-Assad and controls a series of
government-created monopolies. He is an example of what are known in Syria as ‘abna al-sulta’, ‘sons of power’.
To understand Angola’s endemic poverty, consider its richest woman, Isabel dos Santos, billionaire daughter of the longserving president. A recent investigation by Forbes magazine into her fortune concluded, ‘As best as we can trace, every
major Angolan investment held by dos Santos stems either from taking a chunk of a company that wants to do business in
the country or from a stroke of the president’s pen that cut her into the action.’ She does all this while, according to the
World Bank, only a quarter of Angolans had access to electricity in 2009 and a third are living on incomes of less than $2
a day.
Recognising that poor countries are poor because they have extractive institutions helps us understand how best to help
them. It also casts a different light on the idea of foreign aid. We do not argue for its reduction. Even if a huge amount of
aid is siphoned off by the powerful, the cash can still do a lot of good. It can put roofs on schools, lay roads or build wells.
Giving money can feed the hungry, and help the sick — but it does not free people from the institutions that make them
hungry and sick in the first place. It doesn’t free them from the system which saps their opportunities and incentives.
When aid is given to governments that preside over extractive institutions, it can be at best irrelevant, at worst downright
counter-productive. Aid to Angola, for example, is likely to help the president’s daughter rather than the average citizen.
Many kleptocratic dictators such as Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko have been propped up by foreign aid. And it wasn’t
foreign aid that helped to undermine the apartheid regime in South Africa and got Nelson Mandela out of prison, but
international sanctions. Those sanctions came from pressure on governments — including the British government — that
would have preferred not to see them implemented.
Today it is no different. Governments don’t like cutting their ties to dictators who open doors for international business, or
help their geopolitical agendas. Pressure needs to come from citizens who do care enough about international
development to force politicians to overcome the easy temptation of short-run political expediency.
Making institutions more inclusive is about changing the politics of a society to empower the poor — the empowerment
of those disenfranchised, excluded and often repressed by those monopolising power. Aid can help. But it needs to be
used in such a way as to help civil society mobilise collectively, find a voice and get involved with decision-making. It
needs to help manufacture inclusion.
This brings us back to David Cameron. When answering a question at New York University almost two years ago, he put
it perfectly. ‘There is a huge agenda here,’ he said. It is time to ‘stop speaking simply about the quantity of aid’ and ‘start
talking about what I call the “golden thread”.’ This, he explained, is his idea that long-term development through aid only
happens if there is a ‘golden thread’ of stable government, lack of corruption, human rights, the rule of law and
transparent information.
As the Prime Minister says, this is a very different thing to setting an aid spending target. Promoting his golden thread
means using not just aid but diplomatic relations to encourage reform in the many parts of the world that remain in the
grip of extractive institutions. It means using financial and diplomatic clout (and Britain has plenty of both) to help create
room for inclusive institutions to grow. This may be a hard task — far harder than writing a cheque. But it is the surest
way to make poverty history.
Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson are the authors of Why Nations Fail, which David Cameron last week declared
one of his five favourite books of all time.
For all the debate on the worth of aid, we can well afford to pay the price
Madeleine Bunting
Voguish disaffection with helping Africa is born of false hopes and flawed critiques. The moral case to do more is
compelling
Sunday 3 May 2009 16.00 EDT
This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 25 January 2014
From a distance, it could have been a scene from a Constable painting: an idyllic pastoral of cattle feeding from a spring surrounded by green pastures and shaded by handsome trees. But we were in the middle ofAfrica and the cattle were
paddling in the waters on which the local villages depend. More than 40 jerrycans were neatly lined up in a queue to
fill up from the trickle of water coming from a dirty pipe. The chatter and squeals of laughter of a waiting crowd of girls
reverberated across the marshes. They told us that it would be more than four hours before all would have had their turn.
Four hours a day just to get water.
We travelled through the bush along narrow paths to reach this remote part of north-eastern Uganda, but it's a story typical
of the entire continent. It prompts all the questions about Africa that confound a westerner. How can such a simple thing
as clean water be so difficult to provide? How can these girls and their families tolerate the situation – and how can they
still find something to laugh about when the water they are collecting could kill them?
The spring at Ovalanga in the Katine sub-county can be used to illustrate two opposing claims. The first is the familiar
call for donations: give us your money now to transform the lives of these girls and their families. The second is that this
is the proof of the failure of aid. After nearly a half century and a trillion dollars, this kind of chronic deprivation is still
evident everywhere in Africa, runs the argument. What adds force to the latter is that on our way to Ovalanga, we passed
several wells that had broken down; badly constructed, not maintained and never repaired, they are monuments to
ineffective aid.
It is this second argument that is now gaining critical momentum.
Dead Aid, a book by Dambisa Moyo, a western-educated Zambian banker, has triggered an enthusiastic response on
blogs, particularly in the US, which seize on her argument that aid has achieved little, and that donors should give African
countries five years' warning and "turn the taps off". "Sometimes the most generous thing you can do is say no" runs a
typical posting.
William Easterly, a prominent US development economist, who has now set up his own blog, Aid Watch, to expose the
uselessness of aid, criticising among others, the UK government for its aid policies. It's not hard to see why their
arguments find a ready audience. As the credit crunch squeezes spending (both public and private) aid could become an
easy victim for cuts. Will Hutton in a recent column warned that the UK's aid budget could be cut by a third.
The arguments of Moyo, Easterly and their associates are riddled with inaccuracies (for instance, they say that a fraction
of the alleged trillion dollars has actually reached Africa), but it doesn't matter because they are tapping into a widespread
disillusionment with aid – and for that, aid agencies and donor governments bear some responsibility.
For several decades, aid has been accompanied by grotesquely oversimplified propaganda: "Just £5 will save this child's
life by providing a mosquito net." The aim is a well-meaning desire to raise money, but it has created entirely false
expectations – which are now, unsurprisingly, foundering. The false promises are easy to spot, look for words such as
"simple", "easily preventable diseases", "transform" or "save lives'"; or anything which suggests that aid is cheap or
primarily about supplying some bit of technology. Installing a borehole is easy, the tricky bit is to ensure it is maintained.
Alison Evans, director of the Overseas Development Institute, goes as far as to say that "to suggest that [governmentdonated] aid saves lives is a dangerous and false perspective. The assumption is that people can't cope with complexity,
and the debate about aid has been dumbed down – and that feeds through to the politicians." Evans argues that the most
effective aid in the long run is about building up institutions that ensure the accountability mechanisms whereby the state
delivers effective services such as safe water. This is the rationale for the UK's annual £55m in budget support direct to
the Ugandan government. But it's a hard one to sell to the voter, so the aid professionals retreat into their laager and
communicate in a technical, acronym-laden language that is incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
It means that when you arrive at any aid project it's a topsy-turvy world of western social-science jargon; astute African
staff build careers from the "gender sensitisation workshops" and "empowerment programmes" demanded by donors.
Moyo and her ilk would have a field day on this kind of stuff if they left London and Washington and got near enough.
But it has its own rationale. One of the biggest challenges in much of rural Africa is behavioural change, and that is why
aid workers talk all the time about sensitisation. Take health: 70% of the disease burden is preventable at household level
with basic hygiene measures such as handwashing, pit latrines and separating animal and human living quarters. But it's
difficult to get the message through; we struggle with behaviour change in the UK on an issue like child obesity despite
having a largely literate population, mass communications and a functioning health and education system, so it is hardly
surprising that it is so hard to achieve in rural Africa. How do you inculcate a belief that something can be improved in a
people whose sense of possibility is crippled by the sheer struggle for daily survival?
Explaining and justifying aid is a really tough call, and over the next few years as unemployment in the west rises, it is going to get very hard to counter the case that charity should just stay at home. That makes the intervention of the
philosopher Peter Singer and his new book very timely. His argument is compelling: if you see a stray child in the road in
danger of oncoming traffic no one doubts that the moral action is to step in. So why are the children at the spring in
Ovalanga, Uganda or the millions of other children all over Africa any different?
In The Life You Can Save, Singer acknowledges that some aid goes astray, and that some aid is not very effective. But he
turns that argument on its head: so what, if the cost to you has been so little – only the price of a meal in a restaurant or a
new pair of shoes? Such is the affluence of the west, arguments about the cost of aid are irrelevant – we can afford it. And
he puts the threshold very low: anyone who can afford to buy a bottled or canned drink where there is clean tap water
available has money they do not need.
His challenge is a minimum of 5% of your gross income, and more for those on high incomes. The 2005 Make Poverty
History campaign focused on lobbying governments for increased aid budgets, but Singer has shifted the debate into a
new territory of direct personal responsibility. He argues that you can make no claim to any kind of morality without
making a sizeable personal contribution to tackling grotesque global inequalities. Read it; someone's life chances could
depend on it.
For more information on the Guardian's project in Katine, Uganda, visit www.guardian.co.uk/katine
Report | April 2013
U.S. Development Assistance and Sub-Saharan Africa: Opportunities for Engagement
By: George Ingram and Steven Rocker
Brookings Institute
Brookings.edu
U.S. development assistance to Africa creates many opportunities for the United States beyond humanitarian aid, such
as strategic national security partners and increased economic prospects. George Ingram and Steven Rocker
recommend several strategies for the U.S. government to better utilize and direct its foreign assistance to the region.
The Priority
Total bilateral U.S. development assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the State
Department to sub-Saharan Africa nearly quadrupled from roughly $1.94 billion in FY2002 to an estimated $7.08 billion
in FY2012.[1] The rapid uptick in U.S. development assistance to the region was largely driven by global health spending,
specifically the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which concentrates HIV/AIDS resources
primarily to 14 countries, 12 of which are in sub-Saharan Africa.[2]
Currently, USAID operates 27 bilateral and regional missions in sub-Saharan Africa, which in FY2012 provided bilateral
assistance to 47 sub-Saharan African countries. The Africa region’s top five recipients of U.S. assistance in FY2012 were
Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Tanzania and South Africa.[3]
Beyond global health, the U.S. is the leading donor of humanitarian aid to sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the area of
emergency food aid.[4] The Obama administration has also made assistance to agriculture sector development a key
priority in recent years through its Feed the Future program, a global hunger and food security initiative.
In June 2012, President Obama signaled his development priorities toward the region with the release of the White
House’s U.S. Strategy toward Sub-Saharan Africa. Economic growth, food security, public health, women and youth,
humanitarian response and climate change are explicitly listed in the Obama Strategy as U.S. priority areas to further
accelerate development progress in the region.
Why is it Important for the U.S.?
U.S. development assistance funds programs on the ground in ways that bring government agencies and American
organizations and businesses into collaborative activities with Africans who are trying to lift their countries onto a higher
plane of social, political and economic development. The region warrants sustained U.S. engagement for a range of
humanitarian, national security and economic reasons.
Humanitarian interests
As a clear sign of America’s moral leadership around the globe, the U.S. has historically been and remains the leading
donor of humanitarian assistance to the region. In response to the Horn of Africa drought and subsequent famine in the
summer of 2011, for example, U.S. emergency food aid programs provided $740 million to Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia,
South Sudan and Sudan (according to the U.S. State Department). It is fully consistent with American values to continue
to respond vigorously and generously to emergencies in the region.
National security interests
Continued terrorist activities in Somalia, the recent insurgency in Mali, and the potential threat of Boko Haram on
Nigeria—the U.S.’s largest trading partner in sub-Saharan Africa [5]—emphasizes that the U.S. has important national
security interests in the region. Development assistance from the State Department addresses U.S. national security
concerns by funding counterterrorism partnerships between the U.S. and African militaries as well as training for African
soldiers to conduct peacekeeping missions in countries like Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
Liberia.
Economic interests
Sub-Saharan Africa is a region of great economic promise. From 2001-2010, six of the fastest growing economies in the
world were in the region.[6] In fact in 2011, foreign direct investment to sub-Saharan Africa amounted to more than
global bilateral official development assistance in 2011.[7] Other countries, including China, are recognizing and acting
on the increasing commercial opportunities in sub-Saharan Africa. A recent GAO report found that China’s total trade in
goods over the past decade increased faster than and surpassed U.S. trade in the region in 2009.[8]
What is the Opportunity for the U.S.?
1. Sustainable health systems: The vast majority of U.S. global health assistance to sub-Saharan Africa is used to finance
the delivery of health services, which is not sustainable in the long term. Greater focus needs to be directed to building
sustainable health systems so African countries can increasingly meet their own needs.
2. Disaster preparedness and resilience: The U.S. is the leading donor of official humanitarian aid to sub-Saharan Africa.
However, very little assistance is allocated toward disaster prevention and preparedness.[9] By focusing more resources
and expertise toward these areas, the U.S. could contribute in the long term to achieving a reduction in loss of life and the
need for large international responses to disasters.[10]
3. Economic growth: The U.S. should leverage its assistance and other policies to stimulate economic growth in subSaharan Africa. Members of Congress and U.S. government officials should engage the Export-Import Bank, Department
of Commerce, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, U.S. Trade and Development Agency and the U.S. Trade
Representative to ensure that the U.S. is providing a range of government policies and programs to encourage equitable
economic growth and commercial opportunities for U.S. businesses in the region.
4.
Democratization and good governance: The U.S. needs to devote greater attention and support toward governance in
sub-Saharan Africa, including improving governmental collection of revenues and transparent budgeting as well as
building the capacities of civil society and legislative bodies. In FY2011 and FY2012, U.S. global health requests for subSaharan Africa averaged $4.82 billion per year while funding requests for rule of law and human rights, good governance,
political competition and consensus-building and civil society under the USAID-managed Development Assistance
account averaged only $75.73 million over the same period.[11]
Endnotes
[1] Alexis Arieff et al, “U.S. Foreign Assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa: The FY2012 Request”, Congressional Research
Service Report R41840, May 20, 2011, 5
[2] Sessions, Myra, “Overview of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR)” Center for Global
Development
[3] Congressional Budget Justification, Foreign Assistance Summary Tables,
FY2013,15http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/ 185016.pdf.
[4] Ted Dagne, “Africa: U.S. Foreign Assistance Issues”, Congressional Research Service Report RL33591
[5] “Africa”, Office of the United States Trade Representative. http://www.ustr.gov/countries-regions/africa
[6] “Daily chart: Africa’s impressive growth”, The Economist, January 6,
2011.http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/ 2011/01/daily_chart.
[7] World Investment Report 2012: Toward a New Generation of Investment Policies, United Nations Conference on
Trade and Development, Geneva: United Nations, 2012; see also “Development: Aid to developing countries falls
because of global recession”, Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, April 4, 2012
[8] Government Accountability Office. “Sub-Saharan Africa: Trends in U.S. and Chinese Economic Engagement”
February 2013
[9] Global Humanitarian Assistance. “United States - Country Profile.” Global Humanitarian
Assistance. [http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.%20org/countryprofile/unitedstates]http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance. org/countryprofile/united-states.
[10] USAID Policy Framework 2011-2015. Washington: U.S. Agency for International Development, 2011.
[11] FY2013 Congressional Budget Justification Foreign Operations Regional Perspectives Annex, 3-4
Nigerian Abductions Part Of A Terrible Pattern In African Conflicts
May 17, 2014 5:33 AM ET NPR.org GREGORY WARNER
The girls at St. Mary's slept uneasily that night. Rebels were rumored to be nearby and planning an attack. Calls for
protection by school administrators to a nearby army outpost went unanswered.
By nightfall, all the girls "prayed to God and asked Him to take control of our lives," a 16-year-old would later tell a
reporter. During the night, the girls heard boots. Then gunfire. Rough men's voices threatened to toss grenades through the
dormitory windows if they didn't unlock the doors.
That night 139 girls, ages 11 to 16, were bound with ropes and carried off into the dense forest.This was not last month in
Nigeria. It was October 1996 in Uganda. And these rebels weren't the radical Islamists known as Boko Haram. They were
the Lord's Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony.
Kony's group has abducted more than 30,000 Ugandan children, about half of them girls. Did Kony's long career as a
child abductor help pave the way for other groups like Boko Haram?
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power recently tweeted that "in abducting more than 200 girls, Boko Haram is mimicking
one of the LRA's most monstrous tactics."
Similar Tactics In Congo
The same scenario has played out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where rebels raid villages and carry off as many
young girls as they can seize.
Likewise in the 1991-2002 civil war in Sierra Leone, where the phrase "bush wives" came to describe girls kidnapped by
rebel fighters to serve as concubines.
None of these militias can claim to have invented a tactic as old as war itself, but these raids on girls and young women
have become increasingly common in modern African guerrilla warfare.
Why do so many rebels on the continent engage in the mass abduction of young girls?
One reason is terrain.
"These people live in the bush, literally," says Chris Coulter, author of Bush Wives and Child Soldiers. "They need women
as support staff. Someone has to cook, clean, and do all of the other chores that you need done."
It's not only about sex, she says, though sex is often an inescapable part of the girls' imprisonment. Kony ordered the
abduction of children because his rebel army was losing popular support and he needed to replenish his fighting force.
Boys aged 7 to 13 were abducted to be porters and soldiers-in-training. Girls were abducted to serve as domestic servants
and "wives."
A second reason the practice persists is that rebel groups operate in remote regions forsaken by governments and state
armies.
"When criminals like Joseph Kony are given impunity for 20-plus years, it makes a pretty strong case for others who want
to abduct children that they can get away with it, too," says Stacey Yip, a spokesperson for Invisible Children, the group
behind the Kony2012 viral video.
That why she thinks the #BringBackOurGirls and #kony2012 hashtags are so vital: they can keep up international
pressure to hunt down and punish these groups.
Targeting The Defenseless
A third reason girls are targeted is due to their symbolic role as "vessels of virtue" in traditional societies, according to
Lauren Wolfe, director of Women Under Siege, a journalism project on sexualized violence at the Women's Media Center
in New York.
"Boko Haram has chosen a group — girls — that is historically vulnerable, yet whose members carry precious undertones
about the purity of most societies," she wrote in a recent column in Foreign Policy. "It is targeting society's most
defenseless and fetishized."
Wolfe's column takes up the question, posed recently by pundits, as to why the media was "ignoring" the abduction of 276
girls in Nigeria.
On the contrary, she argues, the case has "gotten more attention than any single case of girls abducted in armed conflict in
recent memory." Far more, she notes, than the thousands of girls who are regularly kidnapped or sold into slavery in the
dark corners of the world. "Why," she instead wonders, "are we only now outraged?"
The answer she arrives at, almost to her own surprise, is numerical.
"The kidnapping of so many schoolgirls at once has upped the ante," she wrote. Kidnap a few girls at a time in a conflict
zone and the world barely blinks. But abduct a large number and the world springs to attention.
Of that group, 109 were almost immediately released, unharmed, after a brave Italian headmistress followed them into the
forest to negotiate on their behalf. Thirty girls were not so lucky. The rebels picked out these "light-skinned and beautiful
girls," reported the Ugandan newspaper The Monitor, and kept them as a "gift" for their commander, Joseph Kony.
The raid on St. Mary's wasn't Kony's first raid on a girls' school. That happened in 1987, when the LRA abducted 44
students at Sacred Heart Girls Secondary School, most of them never heard from again.
In the intervening decade, thousands more children were taken, with no effective response from the Ugandan government.
By 1996, Ugandans in cities in the educated south of the country had become inured to stories of the savage deeds
perpetrated by the LRA in the neglected north.
The St. Mary's abduction changed all that.
"It was shocking," remembers Dr. Frederick Golooba-Mutebi, a Ugandan columnist. "There had been an accumulation [of
other kidnappings] that went unnoticed, but the abduction of such a large number of young girls from a school — that had
an important impact on public opinion."
He credits the abduction at St. Mary's with galvanizing Ugandan society.
"It came to our attention that the LRA was not just waging a war against the government, but waging a war, in a sense,
against its own community," Golooba-Mutebi says.
On The International Agenda
The St. Mary's episode also roused international policymakers.
Author Chris Coulter says that the mass abduction "raised the agenda on a policy level" about the "plight of girls in
conflict zones."Now, she says, when donor groups prepare strategies on dealing with post-conflict countries, "girls will be
the number one target group."
That single schoolhouse raid helped set in motion the forces that would ultimately curtail the LRA's reign of terror.
Today, Joseph Kony's whereabouts are not known, though he may be ill and hiding out in a forest of southern Sudan with
just a fragment of his former force.
Perhaps the Nigerian abductions will spell a similar fate for Boko Haram.
But Boko Haram's leader, Abubakar Shekau, has another reason to attack girls' schools: he wants to end all girls'
education. His aim is to be taken seriously under the banner of radical Islam.
Unlike Joseph Kony, who seemed to have stumbled into the hornet's nest of global outrage at least somewhat unwittingly,
Shekau marched in purposely and with YouTube videos. He's inspired a backlash and more than three million hits on the
hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. But he does seem to be basking in the attention — at least for now.