The prevention and treatment of infectious diseases such as malaria and HIV/AIDS have long been hailed as evidence of foreign aid’s success. Give and Take, Nitsan Chorev’s carefully researched analysis of foreign intervention in the East African pharmaceutical industry, delves into the strategies and trade-offs involved. Through her focus on locally owned drug producers in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, Chorev centers on local actors and argues that such actors are not passive recipients of foreign aid. Rather, local actors can have considerable power in shaping and contesting the developmental foreign aid programs offered by international donors, albeit within the context of each particular country’s opportunity structures.

According to Chorev, developmental foreign aid can succeed in supporting the emergence and upgrading of local industry by providing three resources: markets, monitoring, and mentoring. Aid donors created markets through the Global Fund and other foreign aid-funded mechanisms that encouraged local drug producers to compete against foreign producers of antiretroviral and antimalarial drugs. The World Health Organization monitored these firms by imposing quality standards that local producers had to meet in order to be eligible for foreign aid subsidies, even if they ultimately did not receive them. L