Take sub-Saharan Africa. Since the late 1970s, major aid institutions... have called most of the shots in African economic policy and public investment. In no other region has the aid system held such commanding political and financial positions for so long...

Now according to World Bank researchers, the number of Africans living in extreme income poverty ($1 per day or less) in the two decades after 1981 nearly doubled from 164 to 316 million, or from 42 to 47 percent of the sub-Saharan population. Just above them, another 30 percent in 2001 occupied the $1 to $2 per day stratum at the edge of wretchedness. Yet even that grim total estimate of 77 percent is probably too optimistic; experts have disputed World Bank data as seriously understating poverty's true scope and depth.