While aid is supposed to reduce poverty, the conditions attached to it have often had the opposite result, write Dave Prentis, general secretary of Unison, and Louise Richards, chief executive of War on Want, in The Guardian UK. "Donors have commonly required developing countries to privatise their public services and open up their markets in order to qualify for assistance, yet both courses have proved disastrous. The UN's newly published report on the world's least developed countries confirms the evidence on the ground: those states which have liberalised their markets most dramatically have also seen the greatest increases in poverty over the past 10 years."