Dambisa Moyo, Baroness Moyo

Career

World Bank and Goldman Sachs

Following her MBA, Moyo worked at the World Bank from May 1993 to September 1995. She was a consultant in the bank's Europe, Central Asia and Africa departments, and was one of the 20 contributing authors to the World Bank's 1994 annual World Development Report.

After pursuing her MPA and PhD, Moyo joined Goldman Sachs as a research economist and strategist in 2001. She was with the company until November 2008, working mainly in debt capital markets, hedge funds coverage, and global macroeconomics. Part of her tenure at Goldman Sachs was spent advising developing countries on the issuing of bonds on the international market. She was also head of economic research and strategy for sub-Saharan Africa.

Board memberships

After leaving Goldman Sachs, Moyo joined the board of directors of the international brewer SABMiller in 2009. She is also a former board member of Barclays Bank, the international mining company Barrick Gold, 3M, and data storage company Seagate Technology.

As of 2025, she is on the boards of directors of National Geographic, Chevron Corporation, Condé Nast. and the Starbucks Corporation.

Moyo is also a former board member of the charities Lundin for Africa and Room to Read.

She is a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Global Economic Imbalances, The Trilateral Commission, and the Bretton Woods Committee.

In June 2026, Moyo was named Chair of The Economic Club of New York.

Journalism and public speaking

Moyo is a public speaker, commentator, and columnist. She has written for international financial and economic journals, periodicals, and publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, The New York Times, and Time.

She has lectured at financial and economic summits, forums, and conferences, including the annual World Economic Forum conference in Davos, the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Enterprise Institute, the annual Bilderberg Conference, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the Aspen Institute, and the Ambrosetti Forum. She also speaks at venues including TEDTalks and BBC's HARDtalk, and is a commentator on business-news television networks.

Books

Dead Aid

Moyo's first book, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa (2009), became a New York Times bestseller. It argues that government-to-government foreign aid has harmed Africa and should be phased out. In the book she states that in the past 50 years, more than $1 trillion in development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa, and questions whether anything has changed.

The book suggests that official development assistance (ODA), as opposed to humanitarian aid, perpetuates the cycle of poverty and hinders economic growth in Africa. It offers developing countries proposals for financial development instead of relying on foreign government-to-government aid. The Financial Times summarized the book's argument, stating "Limitless development assistance to African governments, [Moyo] argues, has fostered dependency, encouraged corruption and ultimately perpetuated poor governance and poverty." Moyo's solution is to cut poor countries off from aid in five to ten year to force them to instead borrow from international bond markets while touting Chinese foreign direct investment in Africa - an approach many called reckless and harmful.

While a bestseller, the book was poorly received by critics and widely derided in reviews for its poor use of evidence, oversimplification and the repackaging of old ideas previously articulated (such as by Peter Bauer and William Easterly) but without their nuance. The Guardian wrote that the book "is Moyo at her weakest; she is an economist by training and her grasp of the political economy of Africa is lamentable" and called the book "an erratic, breathless sweep through aid history and current policy options for Africa, sprinkled with the odd statistic." In Finance and Development, Clemens wrote that "the book needed a better fact checker and contains numerous unfortunate mistakes" and that it "stumbles as a policy blueprint because it does not come close to offering sufficient evidence that the sweeping changes it recommends in finance mechanisms will greatly improve development outcomes." Paul Collier argued that Moyo, "exaggerates the opportunity for alternative finance and underestimates the difficulties African societies face".

How the West Was Lost

Moyo's second book, How the West Was Lost: Fifty Years of Economic Folly – And the Stark Choices that Lie Ahead (2011), became a New York Times bestseller, debuting at No. 6.

In a review in The Observer, Paul Collier wrote that "her diagnosis of the recent disasters in financial markets is succinct and sophisticated". The Guardian stated, "How the West Was Lost is more interesting, wider in scale and more important than Dead Aid." It went on to state, "Moyo is a very orthodox thinker, unable to consider a world beyond free markets and underpriced resources and blind to the social effects of what she proposes and celebrates"."

Similarly, Alan Beattie of the Financial Times wrote, "The challenges it identifies are for the most part real, if not original. But the huge flaws of the emerging economies are ignored." The Economist said "these arguments need much better supporting material than the book provides".

Winner Take All

Moyo's third book, Winner Take All: China's Race for Resources and What It Means for the World (2012), examines global commodity dynamics over the next several decades, specifically China's massive global rush for natural resources including hard commodities (metals and minerals) and soft commodities (timber and food). It predicts the financial and geopolitical implications of a world of diminishing resources, and argues that China is already well on the way to gaining the upper hand in world economic dominance.

Winner Take All became a New York Times bestseller. A review in the Financial Times stated that "If Dambisa Moyo is right, the demands of the world's most populous state are bad news for the rest of us. ... One cannot accuse Moyo of failing to do her homework." The Telegraph commented "Moyo thinks [China's impact on the global commodity market] will go on and on, powered by an unstoppable Chinese economy. Perhaps she is right, but the grounds for doubting whether the future will be a straight line from the past deserve a hearing."

Edge of Chaos: Why Democracy Is Failing to Deliver Economic Growth – and How to Fix It

In Edge of Chaos, the author crafts an argument that "the global failure to achieve sustained, inclusive growth underpins the rampant political turmoil" increasingly prevalent in the 21st century. Moyo identifies improvements to worker efficiency as key to economic growth, and discusses the need to overhaul democratic capitalism, with potential solutions. The book outlines a 10-point "Blueprint for a New Democracy", designed to encourage the growth of capitalism.

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World

Moyo's fifth book, How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World was released in 2021. It provides an insider's perspective of corporate boards, reassesses the three-part board mandate, and calls for more transparent, knowledgeable, and diverse boards to steer companies through 21st-century challenges. The Financial Times stated that the book would be "highly instructive for aspiring non-executives" and provided "thoughtful analysis and reform proposals against which boardroom sophisticates can usefully test their assumptions".

Personal life

In December 2020 Moyo married billionaire Jared Smith, co-founder of Utah-based cloud computing company Qualtrics.