I attended a presentation by Jeffrey Sachs at this year’s Unite for Sight Conference at Yale University (www.uniteforsight.org). Unite for Sight is an amazing organization that works to empower communities worldwide to improve eye health and eliminate preventable blindness. Dr. Sachs shared some glaring statistics on how little the US and the world spends on foreign assistance to Africa. For example:

- One year of Pentagon spending is larger than the total amount of foreign assistance ever provided to African countries by the entire world.

- The US spends as much on assistance to Africa in a year as we do on the Pentagon in one hour.

It helps to see these statistics visually. Below is a time series of US Defense Spending vs. Official Development Assistance (ODA) from 1962 to 2007. It shows how absolute spending in these areas has grown over the years with growth in US GDP. Click on the play button to see the time series in motion. Click on the circles to see labels. Click on the "size" control on the right side and set it to "Annual Spending" and play the time series again. The small circles that hover along the bottom of the chart show the anemic growth over time of Bilateral ODA (which includes Developmental Food Aid, Humanitarian Aid, etc.) and Multilateral ODA. The circle that blows up into a huge balloon represents annual defense spending. The tool I'm using to generate the chart is the new motion chart gadget in Google Spreadsheet.





Source Data: OECD