Rights-based development imperfect

By Josh Ozer     10/29/09 7:00pm

Much of the Western world's efforts to promote economic growth and human development in the last 60 years have focused on human rights. All people have a right to life, health and happiness - at least according to the unanimous declaration of human rights by the United Nations in 1948. Upcoming commencement speaker and 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus has even argued that access to financial credit is a human right.These may indeed be human rights, and achieving their universal realization would be a tremendous milestone in human development.

But treating development goals like rights may not be the most effective approach to achieving them. Take health, for example. In a recent column for the Financial Times, William Easterly of the Development Research Institute discusses how treating health as a human right has pushed decisions about how to allocate medical aid to developing countries into the political realm. Political institutions tend to fund research for treatments of diseases, such as AIDS, over more cost-effective interventions like malaria bed nets, oral rehydration therapy for diarrhea and childhood vaccinations. As a result, resources tend to be skewed toward the most politically salient causes and not the most cost-effective interventions.

A similar story is evident in the expansion of the microcredit movement. Advocates, including myself at times, have often focused on microcredit as a human right, ignoring the growing concerns of some academics and industry experts that credit can create cycles of debt and may not be as effective a tool in alleviating poverty as was once thought.

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Nevertheless, viewing credit and health as human rights may tremendously expand our ability to fundraise for these causes by galvanizing public opinion. While this may come at some cost to the effectiveness of our interventions, it is quite conceivable that the benefits of the extra resources outweigh these costs.

A world free from disease and poverty is not in our immediate future. If minimizing these human afflictions is indeed our goal, treating health and basic consumption as human rights is not enough. More than 60 years after the universal declaration of human rights, Western efforts to alleviate poverty have not borne much fruit. Africa, for example, is gripped as tightly by extreme poverty as it was 30 years ago. In health, some progress has been made as a result of Western intervention, perhaps because of the rigorous methods available to test the efficiency of medical interventions.

Even though we can accurately assess whether medical treatments work, we still do not always allocate our resources to what works best. It doesn't take an economist or public health official to know there must be a better way.

Health and basic consumption may indeed be human rights. However, a greater focus on the effectiveness of interventions is needed to make sure that we maximize the impact of our efforts.

Luckily, there are some simple things we can do to ensure that foreign aid programs are administered more effectively. First, we should try to donate to and work with aid organizations that set small, tangible and realizable goals. Second, we should support large foundations, like the Gates Foundation, which attempt to turn quantifying the effectiveness of an intervention into an integral part of the aid process. And third, we should lobby our Congress and global leaders to let them know that while we care about the amount of aid we give as a nation, we also care about how our dollars are being spent.

I applaud the efforts of those who work to expand access to education, health, clean water and financial services. At the same time, treating these necessities as human rights cannot prevent us from making the tough decisions about where our money should go in order to best serve the world's poor.

Josh Ozer is a Will Rice College junior.

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