Easterly’s dilemma
William Easterly begins and ends his latest book, The White Man’s Burden, with the heart-rending story of 10-year old Amaretch, an Ethiopian girl whose name means ‘beautiful one’: ‘Driving out of Addis Ababa’, he passes an ‘endless line of women and girls … marching … into the city’. (2006, p. 1). Amaretch’s day is spent collecting eucalyptus branches to sell for a pittance in the city market. But she would prefer to go to school if only her parents could afford to send her. Easterly dedicates the book to her, ‘and to the millions of children like her’. He returns to Amaretch in his concluding sentence: ‘could one of you Searchers’ – the word he uses to define entrepreneurs of all kinds – ‘discover a way to put a firewood-laden Ethiopian preteen girl named Amaretch in school?’ (p. 384).
