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Why foreign aid and Africa don't mix
Friday, Charles Abugre of the UN Millennium Campaign writes for CNN about why aid is important for Africa and how it can be made more effective.
(CNN) -- The World Bank president, Robert Zoellick, recently asked the grand old man of Singapore's success, Lee Kuan Yew, to help the bank make greater progress in Africa. He declined. "The trouble with African presidents," he said, "is they believe the work is done when they've stopped talking."
That, in a nutshell, has been the problem of Africa. Very few African governments have been on the same wavelength as Western providers of aid.
Aid, by itself, has never developed anything, but where it has been allied to good public policy, sound economic management, and a strong determination to battle poverty, it has made an enormous difference in countries like India, Indonesia, and even China.
Those examples illustrate another lesson of aid. Where it works, it represents only a very small share of the total resources devoted to improving roads, schools, heath services, and other things essential for raising incomes.
Aid must not overwhelm or displace local efforts; instead, it must settle with being the junior partner.
Because of Africa's needs, and the stubborn nature of its poverty, the continent has attracted far too much aid and far too much interfering by outsiders.
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So, where -- despite decades of aid -- the conditions for private savings and investment are still forbidding, it is high time we ask ourselves why we are still trying to improve them.
The Blair Commission Report on Africa in 2005 reported that 70,000 trained professionals leave Africa every year, and until they -- and the 40 percent of the continent's savings that are held abroad -- start coming home, we need to use aid more restrictively.
An obvious solution is to focus aid on the small number of countries that are trying seriously to fight poverty and corruption. Other countries will need to wait -- or settle with only small amounts of aid -- until their politics or policies or attitudes to the private sector are more promising.
We should also consider introducing incentives for countries to match outside assistance with greater progress in raising local funds.
President Obama is being criticized for increasing U.S. contributions to the international fight against HIV/AIDS by only two percent, with the result that people in Uganda are already being turned away from clinics and condemned to die.
When challenged, U.S. officials have had a fairly solid answer. Uganda has recently discovered oil and gas deposits but has gone on a spending spree, reportedly ordering fighter planes worth $300 million from Russia, according to a recent report in the New York Times.
Does a government that shows such wanton disregard for common sense or even good taste really have the moral basis for insisting on more help with AIDS?
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Development aid to Africa
Top 10 "official development assistance" recipients in 2008:
1 Ethiopia $3.327 billion
2 Sudan $2.384 billion
3 Tanzania $2.331 billion
4 Mozambique $1.9994 billion
5 Uganda $1.657 billion
6 DR Cong $1.610 billion
7 Kenya $1.360 billion
8 Egypt $1.348 billion
9 Ghana $1.293 billion
10 Nigeria $1.290 billion
Net official development assistance to Africa in 2008: $44 billion.
