A brochure for an African tour has sparked a debate about a well-known international aid program and how Westerners view the poor.

The dust-up began on The Huffington Post when Magatte Wade, an African entrepreneur, criticized a Rwandan project that offers tours of a Millennium Villages site, an antipoverty effort developed by Jeff Sachs, an economist at Columbia University.

Ms. Wade said a brochure advertising the tour patronized Africans and was evidence that Mr. Sachs’s development program was misguided.

William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University and a frequent critic of Mr. Sachs, added fuel to the fire on his Aid Watch blog, asking the question: “Should starving people be tourist attractions?”

Millennium Villages and the tour company have fired back.

The director of Eos Visions, which help set up the tour, writes in a response that that the tourism effort is run by Rwandans and is respectful to Africans.

In a comment on Aid Watch, Josh Ruxin, who manages the Millennium Village project in Rwanda, writes that Ms. Wade’s article was “utterly misguided, misinformed, and malicious” and that his organization does not operate the tour — despite Ms. Wade’s assertions.

What do you think of the debate?