Voice on America posted excerpts from an interview with CGD fellow Todd Moss yesterday:

“Single solutions (to poverty in Africa) are tempting: more aid, more democracy, eradicate corruption, get prices right, get better leadership. But inevitably, these single answers leave true believers disheartened. In the book I call Africa ‘the graveyard of silver bullets’,” quips Todd Moss, a respected international economist and author of the recently-released book, ‘African Development: Making Sense of the Issues and Actors’…

“The saintly reputation in some circles of NGO’s is sometimes underserved. Many NGO’s loudly demand to be heard and claim to speak for the people, but are themselves often accountable to nobody.”…

Moss labels the aid industry in Africa a “mess of confused ideas” and “dysfunctional agencies” that is in itself part of Africa’s problem.

Much of the data on which efforts at development in Africa are based is of “pretty bad quality”, says Moss.

“Even very basic information such as GDP, exports, number of children in school, or how much a particular country spends on hospitals, is little more than an educated guess. Sometimes formal surveys are done – through a census or other formal agencies – but these are a lot more infrequent than you would think,” he warns…

“As a whole there is still no clear way to turn Africa around. Even if its recognized that external efforts can only do so much, and that change must come from within, the development community still really does not know how to encourage that process. In short, we simply do not know how to make Chad more like South Korea.”

It’s not all bad news. Read more. Unfortunately, the audio link is broken at the moment.