--- title: William Easterly: Stop Sending Aid to Dictators description: Traditional foreign aid often props up tyrants more than it helps the poor. It’s time for a new model canonical: https://time.com/23075/william-easterly-stop-sending-aid-to-dictators/ author: William Easterly article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-03-13T10:56:19.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:53:50.758Z article:section: Ideas og:title: William Easterly: Stop Sending Aid to Dictators og:description: Traditional foreign aid often props up tyrants more than it helps the poor. It’s time for a new model og:url: https://time.com/23075/william-easterly-stop-sending-aid-to-dictators/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6462513c10db8a77/6986854a06f2c1600c32dd9a/dictators-aid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1500 og:image:height: 844 og:image:alt: Opression og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: William Easterly: Stop Sending Aid to Dictators twitter:description: Traditional foreign aid often props up tyrants more than it helps the poor. It’s time for a new model twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6462513c10db8a77/6986854a06f2c1600c32dd9a/dictators-aid.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Stop Sending Aid to Dictators > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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That’s when the international community–experts from the U.N. and other bodies–swoop into third-world countries and offer purely technical assistance to dictatorships like Uganda or Ethiopia on how to solve poverty. Unfortunately, dictators’ sole motivation is to stay in power. So the development experts may get some roads built, but they are not maintained. Experts may sink boreholes for clean water, but the wells break down. Individuals do not have the political rights to protest disastrous public services, so they never improve. Meanwhile, dictators are left with cash and services to prop themselves up–while punishing their enemies. But there is another model: free development, in which poor individuals, asserting their political and economic rights, motivate government and private actors to solve their problems or to give them the means to solve their own problems. Compare free development in Botswana with authoritarian development in Ethiopia. In Ethiopia in 2010, Human Rights Watch documented how the autocrat Meles Zenawi selectively withheld aid-financed famine relief from everyone except ruling-party members. Meanwhile democratic Botswana, although drought-prone like Ethiopia, has enjoyed decades of success in preventing famine. Government relief directed by local activists goes wherever drought strikes. In the postwar period, countries such as Chile, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have successfully followed the path of free development–often in spite of international aid, not because of it. While foreign policy concerns have often led America to prop up dictatorial regimes, we need a new rule: no democracy, no aid. If we truly want to help the poor, we can’t accept the dictators’ false bargain: ignore our rights abuses, and meet the material needs of those we oppress. Instead, we must advocate that the poor have the same rights as the rich everywhere, so they can aid themselves. _Easterly is the co-director of New York University’s Development Research Institute and author of_ The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/23075/william-easterly-stop-sending-aid-to-dictators/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/23075/william-easterly-stop-sending-aid-to-dictators/"},"headline":"Stop Sending Aid to Dictators","datePublished":"2014-03-13T10:56:19.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:53:50.758Z","description":"Traditional foreign aid often props up tyrants more than it helps the poor. 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