A dutch NGO decided to give some Indian villages cows to help them. A year later, they came back to find that the villagers had taken their girl children out of school to look after the cows. With the best of intentions, the NGO had deprived a generation of girls of an education. Exploring shocking cases of waste and poor planning, Abhi shows how foreign aid is counter productive because we are wired to only care about services we pay for. The solution he argues is not to cut aid but to spend even more in a way that works with human nature rather than against it. The way to sustainable development is to spark an accountability revolution in the developing world by engineering entitlement in its citizens. Watch to learn how we can do this.


Abhishek is a graduate student at the University of Oxford studying the impacts of taxes and foreign aid on development. His research shows that foreign aid may hurt development by making citizens care less about corruption and explores ways of making aid spending more effective. He has lived and worked in Nepal, India and Hong Kong before moving to the United States where he graduated as class valedictorian from Dartmouth College in 2015.


This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx