The title of Oxfam's press release today, Public not private - the key to ending global poverty, sums up the subject of their brand-new report on how to provide health, education and water for the world's poor.
I imagine that we'll see an official response from the World Bank at the annual meetings later this month. My personal, very unofficial response is that the report is absolutely correct - when it says the number of people living without access to these basic services is scandalous. And yes, the best case scenario is that developing country governments step up and meet the needs of all of their constituents. But I disagree with Oxfam's insistence that "meeting the MDG targets on health, education, and water and sanitation would require an extra $47 billion a year." If throwing big piles of money at development problems worked, we would have solved these problems already. Plenty of big checks have been written that accomplished frustratingly little.
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