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Despite the approximately $50 billion in international aid Africa receives each year, statistics show development and growth are slowing, debt is mounting, and inflation is multiplying.

Zambia native Dambisa Moyo has an explanation: in the above sentence, replace the word "despite" with the phrase "because of".

"In fact, many African policymakers view aid as permanent income, not as a temporary solution," Moyo told The Jewish State in a recent phone interview. "And, obviously, with that comes a shift in the mindset of the manner in which people address these issues and address policymaking."

Moyo received her Ph.D. in economics from Oxford University and has a master's from Harvard, as well as a bachelor's degree in chemistry and an MBA in finance from the American University in Washington, D.C. She has worked for the World Bank and Goldman Sachs in its debt capital markets division. Reviewers of her new book, "Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa," have welcomed what many hope will be a new conversation on aid to Africa that will be a little less Bono and a lot more Moyo.

Moyo's book develops her thesis that no-strings-attached aid and cheap loans that keep coming increase corruption, cause lazy policymaking, smother creativity and innovation, and dissuade leaders from developing local economies and building critical infrastructure. Her first recommendation is the phasing out of aid, which will help spur innovation, and she told The Jewish State that Africa's debt burden is actually a relic of the current aid model advocated so dramatically by (non-African) celebrities like the aforementioned U2 frontman Bono.

"There are broader issues with the whole reliance on celebrity culture," Moyo said. "I want to hear from African leaders -- I want to hear what their plan is for Africa, in the long term. Even if they come up and say 'actually we need more aid,' at least we're hearing what their opinion is."

The necessity of self-reliance

Moyo said Africans must be able to provide for themselves, but such a focus on aid creates a cycle of dependency.

"We need some form of accountability," Moyo said. "We need a sense that ultimately the providers of infrastructure, health care, education, and even security should be the African governments themselves."

In her book, Moyo talks about the current Chinese investment in Africa. By way of background, during the Cold War period, African nations were the recipients of aid from either Western democracies or communist nations in a battle in which each side sought to limit the spread of the other's ideology. In this respect, Africa received much no-strings-attached aid. After the Cold War, sub-Saharan Africa was still in dire economic condition, but was of less strategic value. Since then, Africa has received a steady diet of Western aid.

But in recent years China has invested in infrastructure projects in Africa, since the continent's cheap labor and China's low-level labor standards made for a profitable combination. Though some of the work likely is exploitative, Moyo said China's entrepreneurial approach is better for Africa, too.

"As opposed to even with the best interests, the sort of governance and sort of positive anticorruption perspective [favored by the West] which is kind of forced down your throat, which doesn't grow organically, so to speak," she said. "Ultimately, it's about jobs. And the Chinese strategy is providing jobs, whereas the Western strategy of just full-on aid is not."

There are external barriers, of course, to Africa's development beyond misplaced financial aid. Two of these involve the Western practices of offering farm subsidies to local farmers and import tariffs, which often price foreign farms -- especially those in developing nations -- out of Western markets. U.S. leaders are also wary of lifting trade barriers if it means an African farm will be nationalized and the money will be transferred essentially from American farmers to a dictator such as Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.

Moyo said access to Western markets would help African farmers, but they should also focus on incentive-based trade.

"The thing about trade is that it's rather diversified, it's not like all the money pools to one person," Moyo said. "All the exporters and farmers would actually gain. And actually, again, the government is incentivized -- if there's not aid -- to see that type of investment occur, because that's the only source of their tax base."

It takes a village

One of the successes Moyo covers in her book is what is called microfinancing or microlending. It involves lending small amounts to poor people in a village, who must repay the loan or other members of their village will not be given loans in the future. The small sums of money exchanged, as well as the localized "peer pressure" burden of responsibility in place of actual collateral, has made microlending -- first popularized by Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus -- an efficient source of small-scale funding.

Moyo believes the microfinancing model can be expanded.

"I think that it has scope for evolution," she said. "One of the things that I've been discussing is this whole idea that, right now, I actually believe that the capital -- the money -- actually exists in Africa, but there's this sort of disintermediation that occurs because they don't have enough faith in the system."

Disintermediation is the removal of a middleman in a transaction, but in Africa's case, in the point Moyo was making, that often means removing a valuable link in Africans' fiscal chain.

Moyo said the hope is that microfinancing will help build a stronger economic climate in which small businesses can attract venture capital. To help build that climate, Moyo believes African governments should cut red tape and remove complex, expensive, and confusing regulations that prevent foreign investors from making the effort to invest in Africa.

"I only think you'll get to the venture capital stages once people feel much more confident about investing in these countries, and they'll only get to that stage if there's no aid which is disrupting the incentive structure of the economy," she said.

Breaking the permanence of temporary aid

Moyo was asked by The Jewish State if the development aid model that seems to be failing in Africa is also failing among the Palestinians, with the U.S. administration planning to transfer nearly $1 billion to Palestinians in Gaza for post-war cleanup.

Moyo responded that there is a critical difference between the two situations, since the money funneled to the Palestinian National Authority is usually military aid. But, she added, there is a lesson there, too.

"If you want to view it more like the issue of development versus military aid or bailout out, something like military aid is supposed to be temporary, but look at the situation not just in the Middle East but in Pakistan and Iraq and Afghanistan, where actually the costs of intervention can extend multi-year periods and can be quite substantial," she said.

Moyo isn't a lone voice on the aid issue, either. Rwandan President Paul Kagame and Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade have both expressed serious doubts about the aid model.

"And yet nobody hears that view," Moyo said. "That's an African leader talking about what he thinks can work, and yet we would rather hear from the celebrity quarters than from the African leadership itself, which I think is not very useful."

Moyo would like to see African leaders take the initiative and begin rejecting foreign aid, but either way she wants the aid model scrapped. In the book, Moyo recounts how the U.S.'s Marshall Plan, which offered large aid injections into post-war Europe, was successful in large part because Europe had existing infrastructure, which the American aid money help rebuild. Africa, however, must build that infrastructure.

An it's not Europe that Moyo hopes Africa emulates, but rather the United States.

"America was basically built on the backbone of innovation," Moyo said. "And I think that's really very important."

"Dead Aid" is available at Borders, Barnes and Noble, Amazon.com, and other major booksellers.