June 10, 2007

Down to Business - At last, a G8 strategy to help Africans to help themselves

Two years ago at Gleneagles, Tony Blair’s impassioned advocacy forced Africa to the forefront of the G8 agenda, eliciting from his colleagues ambitious pledges to heal the continent’s ills. In return, African governments committed themselves (not for the first time) to democracy and clean government. The intervening period has imposed a more sober assessment of what is feasible.

The G8 record since Gleneagles has been good on debt relief – which required no new spending but has fallen well short of the target for aid. Africa’s Gleneagles pledges have in turn been mocked by its leaders’ refusal to denounce violations of the political compact they made, notoriously in Zimbabwe and Sudan. In Niger, Kenya, Ethiopia and even Uganda, scandals surrounding the abuse of aid have revived doubts about whether aid to Africa “works”. It is thus a tribute both to Mr Blair’s persistence, and to President Bush’s commitment to alleviating poverty and disease in Africa, that the G8 effort continues.

Yesterday’s G8 declaration on “growth and responsibility in Africa” was more nuanced and businesslike. Before the ink had a chance to dry, it was denounced by Western poverty activists as a retreat from the “spirit of Gleneagles”. These critics would do well to listen to poverty activists in Africa itself, who at a “parallel” summit in Mali denounced peculation and malfeasance among African governments and officials, and to African business leaders who insisted last week that poverty would never be overcome without concerted efforts to facilitate private enterprise and open up trade.

These Africans understand that “success” must be judged not by the sum total of aid provided, but by evidence that it is creating wealth and expanding opportunity. There is no automatic correlation between aid spending and growth or even social welfare. Of the ten African countries that receive more than half of all aid to the continent, only Uganda is making headway, while oil-rich Nigeria, which gets nearly a fifth of the total and has also been a huge beneficiary of debt relief, has worsened.
It’s Grrrrr8 (honest)

As the G8 summit begins in Germany, Hugo Rifkind explains everything you need to know – and lots of stuff you don’t

The merit of the revised G8 Africa strategy is that it is light on Make Poverty History rhetoric and strong on specifics. It is better to have a firm commitment to spend $60 billion on fighting Aids, tuberculosis and malaria, a step prompted by Mr Bush’s announcement last month of a $30 billion US programme to tackle Africa’s big killer diseases, than the uncosted Gleneagles promise of antiretroviral drugs for all. Even better, this year’s communiqué focuses far more firmly than before on the private sector. This is reflected in a $4 billion “aid for trade” fund to help African exporters to compete, and in a commitment to develop local capital markets.

Here at last is a sensible African strategy. Lack of access to local bank loans is a key constraint on growth. Africa’s entrepreneurs have been the Cinderellas of the international aid industry. This concentration on their needs, putting the emphasis on individual effort and success, is new and welcome. Now, for trade talks that would let Africans sell the products of their efforts in Western markets.