Devex: It’s our responsibility to #stopthemyth on foreign aid
Joe Cerrell, managing director for global policy and advocacy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

“…One constant refrain about aid that I’ve heard — particularly in more recent years living in Europe — is this: ‘We have to choose between helping the poor here at home and helping the poor abroad.’ … Quite simply, if one percent of the budget was redirected back to domestic issues in a donor country, it would only be a drop in the bucket — but invested in the developing world, it is helping to spur historic progress and prosperity. As Bill and Melinda Gates pointed out, by many measures the world is better today than it has ever been. Upwards of a billion people have lifted themselves out of poverty; many countries that used to be recipients of aid are now self-sufficient, and some have become emerging donors. What this says to me is that if more people knew what is undeniably true — that aid is a small piece of the budget and that it works — they would support it. We need to do a better job sharing the success stories and each of us has a shared responsibility to help #stopthemyth” (2/3).