Congratulations on your appointment as Chair of the UN Panel on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).  This reflects the progress of a decade and a half in which the UK has taken an increasingly forward position on international development issues, highlights of which included the establishment of the Commission for Africa and the Gleneagles Summit in 2005 – and the UK, unlike some of its G8 partners, has made a pretty good fist of delivering on its commitments.

But it is also a tribute to the personal political leadership which you have demonstrated in sticking with the commitment to reach the 0.7% oda/gni target next year, despite significant cuts in almost every other area of Government expenditure.  This is the right thing to do, both because it will make a significant difference to millions of lives and because it helps to cement our reputation as a country which negotiates hard but then does what it has said it will do.

The MDGs were put in place to encourage Governments to focus on pro-poor development and donors to support those efforts – and have been enormously influential.  But however successful we are in meeting the overall objective of halving the proportion of people living in absolute poverty by 2015, that still leaves us with the other half; and however successful we are in meeting the other objectives we are still left with too many mothers dying in child-birth; too many people dying of preventable illnesses; too many children not reaching their fifth birthday.

So I encourage you to set a target date of 2025 by which we should aim to get rid of absolute poverty, benefiting the poorest, most marginalised and most vulnerable people in the world.  It sounds and is ambitious, but is eminently possible on the basis of the progress made to date.  This has been in large part because of economic growth in India and China, which has pulled literally hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.  Many countries in Africa are also growing strongly and steadily.

Of course the MDGs themselves focus essentially on basic health and primary education, and have been criticised for being too narrow.  It is, though, clear that outcomes in these areas depend upon a broad range of inputs and conditions.  Progress won’t happen without reasonable standards of governance (which means having the capacity, as well as the will, to do things properly) and peace and security.  If you have those things, you can begin to build the health and education systems that you need to deliver the MDGs.  But you can’t sustain those systems unless you have strong economic growth; and you won’t have that strong economic growth without encouraging the private sector.  The private sector needs a strong infrastructure in place in order to thrive.  And so on…

Trying to capture all this complexity in a set of Goals, Targets and Indicators is impossible.  So an alternative approach could be for each country to set out clearly its own strategy for achieving the overall objective of eliminating absolute poverty by 2025 in a way which is consistent with the Millennium Declaration, which has important things to say about issues like rights which are not included explicitly within the MDGs and which – unlike the MDGs – was agreed by every single UN member state.  Indeed, a number of countries have already added or modified Goals to address specific areas of concern such as governance or specific national infections.

But this country focus is not, by itself, enough.  More than ever before, in a process given additional momentum by the global economic downturn, it has become evident that we are all in this together.  We face common challenges of – for example – creating decent jobs for a rapidly growing population; food security, agriculture and nutrition; and the risk of global pandemics which do not respect national boundaries and which require common regimes of diagnosis, information sharing and treatment.

In no area is this common challenge and need to work together more evident than in the environment and climate change.  We have only one planet; if we allow it to become unsustainable, it becomes so for every one of us.  We need to bring more closely together the parallel tracks of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘development’, and the Rio + 20 Conference in the middle of the year, as we begin to think about the post-MDG world, could hardly be more timely.

So there is a set of issues for poorer countries to address, around their country plans to eliminate absolute poverty at a national level.  There is a set of issues around global public goods, including the environment and climate change, which we must all address together.  And there is a third set of issues which the better off countries need to address, which is around their policies which have a direct, negative impact on developing countries.  This includes reforming the governance of the International Financial Institutions; persuading the US that Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is much the best choice to lead the World Bank into the post-MDG era would be the best possible start to your Chairmanship.

But there are more direct ways in which we have a negative impact.  Cotton and cocoa farmers in West Africa remain poorer than they need be because of EU or US trade barriers and subsidies.  The weapons which continue to fuel conflict in developing countries are rarely produced there.   It is by addressing these sorts of issue that you could really help those countries that are determined to pursue the goal of poverty elimination.  It demands a whole-of-Government approach, and moving the UK in that direction would strengthen still further the moral authority with which you take on this mantle, and set an example for others to follow.  It is an opportunity I urge you to seize.

Myles Wickstead CBE is Visiting Professor (International Relations) Open University; Head of Secretariat, Commission for Africa.

Pedro Pires - former President of Cape Verde and winner of the 2011 Mo Ibrahim Prize for African Leadership

For more from Mike visit his blog

Former president of  Cape Verde, Pedro Pires, has won the 2011 Mo Ibrahim African Leadership Prize. The prize is given to African leaders who have voluntarily stepped down from power, and who have demonstrated a commitment to good governance.

Pires joins former presidents of Mozambique and Botswana, Joaquim Chissano and Festus Mogae, in receiving the award, worth $5 million with an additional £200,000 each year for the rest of their lives.

Pires, like Chissano and Mogae, is a worthy recipient of the award, with Cape Verde having experienced not just sound economic growth (having recently joined Botswana in being considered a ‘middle income country’), but also a twenty year record of a multi-party democracy which has resulted in changes of ruling party (which despite the recent victory by Michael Sata in the Zambian elections, remains a rarity on the continent).

An award to celebrate examples of good leadership is a good counter to those who portray governments and leaders in Africa as unremittingly awful. But as I argued in 2008, in a comment piece for the Royal African Society on the award of the Leadership Prize to Chissano: “The notion that good leadership can be encouraged through rewards such as … the lure of hard cash and a prize seems rather weak.”

At the time, I saw three issues with the nature of the prize. Firstly, whether it could, as a tool, help improve governance in Africa. The prize money is not sufficiently rewarding to counter the gains to be made from plundering the public purse, nor is it sufficiently prestigious to offer international cachet and standing to tempt the less good onto the path of honour. Secondly, the focus on leadership ignores the constraints (domestic but especially international) on effective governance. And finally, I questioned the underlying message that the prize sent out: is it patronising to suggest that good leadership should be rewarded, rather than expected?

Have I changed my mind? Not awarding the prize in 2009 or 2010 was an important statement, ensuring it did not become seen as rewarding the best of a bad bunch, and suggesting a minimum threshold of expectation for what good leadership should look like. Moreover, it is becoming increasingly prestigious, with the announcement of the award receiving considerable media attention. Is it patronising? I’m not so sure on this any more. If the standards are rigorously applied – and the panel making the decision contains those who few would quibble over their example of leadership – and the prize is seen to go to an individual who can genuinely claim to have made a difference (i.e. it doesn’t reward just good leadership – someone who has done what any president or prime-minister should do as part of their job – but exceptional leadership), then it has merit.

Moreover, even the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded this year to Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (surely a future contender for the Mo Ibrahim prize), Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, and Yemen activist Tawakul Karman, has not been without its own share of controversy. The award to Barak Obama, on the strength of his commitments made in speeches rather than direct action at the time, looked more like a political comment on his predecessor than a genuine recognition of outstanding work towards peace and reconciliation.

But the point that the focus on a single person underplays wider constraints on effective good governance remains salient, I think. Not only does it give such prominence to a single individual, rather than recognising governance as resting upon multiple systems and layers of institutions and individuals; it also diverts attention from both a criticism of how ‘good governance’ is understood as a concept, and how international policies and processes of globalisation place limits and constraints on what any individual government can do. This is not necessarily the fault of the prize, but the prize has become the lens through which much of the media discusses and presents African leadership and governance.

The concept of good governance appears at first sight rather obvious and non-controversial. Who wouldn’t agree that tackling corruption, enabling political debate and opposition, transparency and rule of law are good things. But look more closely at how donors define good governance, and it becomes clear that ‘good governance’ is governance that supports free markets, open competition, and opportunities for foreign investment. These may not be bad things, but they are certainly not politically neutral. For many critics, good governance is part of the package of reforms to buttress neo-liberalism.

Furthermore, international trade laws and policies, reliance on donor funding, lack of real power on the global stage mean that opportunities for using government and governance as a tool for pursuing a radical alternative is limited (and even if recognised by international prizes, would not be welcomed by those who wield international clout).

So I have changed my mind, to some extent, at least. It has become more prestigious than I thought it would or could. It has not settled on second-best candidates but has had the strength to withhold the prize when no suitable person exists. In doing so, it has sought to recognise exceptional leadership – those who would be considered good leaders whichever country they happened to be leaders in. But – and it is a big but – there is a question about the underlying understanding of what good governance is and looks like. It does still contribute to a picture of African exceptionalism (even if this is not the intention of the prize, but the reaction to it). And it allows the rich world off the hook in its implicit assertion that good leadership rests upon leaders alone, not the contexts in which they seek to lead.

Mike Jennings is  Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS

This piece was originally published on Mike’s blog http://mikejennings101.wordpress.com/

‘Also tonight,’ said Kirsty Wark in the opening link to Newsnight on BBC2 on August 4, ‘torture, rape and deliberate starvation.’  She promised that Newsnight’s ‘exclusive undercover investigation’ would reveal evidence that ‘the Ethiopian government used millions of pounds of international aid to punish their political opponents.’   That was not all.  ‘We also investigate allegations of human rights abuses.’

By Peter Gill

In the course of 17 minutes, Newsnight managed to review six years’ worth of all that had gone wrong in Ethiopia, from post-election violence in 2005, to the intensified anti-insurgency operations in Somali Region after 2007, to more recent opposition complaints that their supporters were being deprived of international development assistance.   To emphasise the British aid connection, the film concluded: ‘The purpose of development aid is to help Ethiopia on to its feet, to establish democracy, justice and the rule of law.  The evidence we’ve gathered suggests it is failing.’

The BBC commissioned its Ethiopia film from the recently established Bureau of Investigative Journalism in London whose website now carries no fewer than 13 stories on the trouble with Ethiopia under the generic tagline ‘Ethiopia Aid Exposed.’  Headlines include ‘Revealed: Aid to Ethiopia increases despite serious human rights abuses,’ ‘Aid as Weapon of political oppression in the Southern Regions’ and ‘Analysis: European taxpayers fund abuses in Ethiopia.’  Under the same tagline, there is also ‘Get the Data: UK Aid to Ethiopia.’

The timing of the programme could hardly have been worse for the hungry and the very poor in Ethiopia.  The country is directly affected by the current East African food emergency and additionally burdened by many thousands of refugees fleeing Somalia in search of food across the border.   The broadcast came as official and private appeals for international help are faltering, and just 24 hours after the United Nations declared an extension of formal famine conditions to cover five regions of southern Somalia.  It is now Africa’s worst humanitarian crisis in 20 years.

Because the BBC crew travelled to Ethiopia as tourists, not journalists, they did not interview any Ethiopian officials.  Nor did they approach any foreign aid officials in the country, so the field was left to opposition politicians and a foreign critic.  Nor was any minister from either the Department for International Development or the Foreign Office able to give up an evening to explain why Britain gave aid to Ethiopia in the first place.  It is now the largest single recipient of UK bilateral assistance, a commitment that will rise from £290 million this year to £390 million by 2015.

So it was Mr Abdirashid Dulane, the deputy Ethiopian Ambassador in London, who faced a seven-minute inquisition from Kirsty Wark on torture, rape and human rights abuse.   He had received a written account of the programme’s allegations, but was denied the chance to view the film before it was aired.   He managed in passing to make the point that the Newsnight film lacked ‘even-handedness,’ and the embassy followed up the next day with a statement complaining that the report’s timing was ‘guaranteed to inflict maximum damage on those who are suffering from the worst drought in sixty years in our region.’

The programme-makers insist they were not canvassing the suspension of emergency or development aid to Ethiopia, although that was certainly the message received by many respondents to the programme.   Overseas Ethiopian critics of the government were cock-a-hoop with the story, and one early British comment on the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s website recommended that ‘the UK government stop any financial help to this country until they can be assured that any monies given are used in a non-political way and are for the benefit of the people who are in greatest need.’  An Addis Ababa reporter for the online news service Ezega.com urged her own government to investigate the allegations, yet concluded that the BBC report ‘might cost millions who are starved the food aid they expect from the international community.’

As for the aid-givers, the critical issue here is their handling of allegations over the past two years that development assistance is being used as a political tool by Ethiopia’s ruling party to favour government supporters and, through withholding it, punish their opponents.   The complaints were first made by opposition figures in Ethiopia, but gained traction with the publication of ‘Development without Freedom: How aid underwrites repression in Ethiopia,’ a thorough piece of work researched in 2009 by Human Rights Watch and published in October 2010

With the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) in the lead, the aid-givers’ Development Assistance Group in Addis Ababa pre-empted the Human Rights Watch report by commissioning one of their own.   ‘Aid Management and Utilisation in Ethiopia’ was published in July 2010 as ‘a study in response to allegations of distortion in donor-supported development programmes.’ It has since been used by the Ethiopian government and the donors to assert that no credible evidence has been found to substantiate the allegations.  DFID repeated the same line last week.  It is at best disingenuous.  The report was in its own estimation ‘an exploratory and desk-based study’ – in other words, its compilers did not leave the office – and it emphasised repeatedly that it was ‘not an investigation’ and ‘does not seek to prove or disprove allegations of distortion.’

Worse, the report said donors were drawing up plans for a second phase of the study that ‘could include detailed fieldwork.’   More than a year has passed, and there appears to have been no such fieldwork, only more attention to the paperwork.   The aid-givers do not even seem to have acted on the invitation of the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in his exchanges with Human Rights Watch.  ‘If we get credible reports, we will investigate,’ he said, ‘not to please anyone, but to ensure the credibility of our party.’  The DFID record here is hardly an inspiring example of that new regime of transparency and rigorous results-based monitoring promised by Andrew Mitchell, the new Secretary of State.

Part of the reason for DFID’s tangled response to the aid allegations lies in its own heavy investment in the ‘governance’ agenda.   What was once a straightforward departmental commitment to ‘eliminating world poverty’ has since become, in the swiftly changing fashions of the aid world, a determination to promote democracy, justice and the rule of law.  Thus Newsnight was able to overlook Ethiopia’s significant achievements in bearing down on poverty and extending health and education services to conclude that our aid effort was failing.

Where should outsiders draw the line on which poor countries to help, and when to stop?   Is the rich world interested in helping Africa’s poor or in promoting government systems which resemble its own?   Three days after the Newsnight report on BBC Television, BBC Radio posed the same question this way:  ‘How badly does a country have to behave to forfeit support from the British taxpayer?’   A powerful edition of File on Four investigated allegations that Rwanda and Zimbabwe had sent spies to Britain to stifle opposition abroad, sometimes even to kill, and had used our asylum system to infiltrate refugee communities.

The evidence presented was strong, but File on Four was careful not to answer its own question.   It got a senior Labour politician to do it for them instead.   Kim Howells was a Foreign Office minister and chaired the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee.  He was certain these countries should be threatened with having their aid cut off.  He accepted there would be a human price to be paid:  ‘It may be that the poor people who receive the aid are going to grow poorer and their children are going to suffer and so on, but I don’t think we can go on like this.’

At a time of intensifying controversy over the UK aid budget – increasing while almost everything else is cut – it is a provocative notion that Britain should use aid to reward and punish foreign governments for their record on ‘governance’ rather than for helping the poor out of poverty.   It comes close to the bad old ways with aid during the Cold War in Africa.  What would the British taxpayer have to say to that, if he or she was ever asked?

Peter Gill is the author of Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid published by Oxford University Press in 2010

By the peaceful standards of modern Malawi, the 20th of July was a very bloody day indeed. At least 19 people were killed and many more were injured, in demonstrations against the Mutharika government that took place in and around the main cities of Lilongwe, Blantyre, Zomba and Mzuzu. Having begun in a peaceful, carnival, atmosphere of red shirts and banners, they quickly turned violent as the heavily-armed police and army, finding themselves in a period of indecision over the legality of these protests, responded characteristically with live bullets and tear-gas.

The old men who lead the Malawian Opposition parties, John Tembo for the Malawi Congress Party, and Friday Jumbe for the United Democratic Front, quickly melted away from the angry streets, leaving the escalating riots to a a few hard-pressed protest marshals  and the party-youth of the governing, Democratic Progressive Party. As always, there were large numbers of angry young men, freed by Malawi’s huge unemployment crisis and eager to express their multitude dissatisfactions.

President Bingu wa Mutharika, himself a nervous and irascible old man, now ruefully contemplates the burned-out houses and the looted shops of this “Warm Heart of Africa” and he blames western interference, along with “satanic” local Civil Society groupings, for the disaster. His rhetoric is becoming increasingly incoherent and apocalyptic.

Bingu’s massive first-term (2004-2009) popularity on the domestic and international fronts, now seems very distant. It was based on his decision to channel Malawi’s scarce foreign exchange reserves into the purchase of foreign chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds for subsidised use by Malawi’s millions of smallholder, maize-growing, farmers. That bold presidential decision propelled Malawi from regular food deficits to a permanent over-production of the maize food staple. It made Bingu — who was only copying what the USA and the EU had been doing for decades — into an overnight expert on food security and, for many Malawians, their very own “economic engineer”. Even the bilateral and multilateral aid agencies which have kept the Malawian economy unsteadily on its feet since Independence in 1964 and have been temperamentally suspicious of such “unsustainable” economic strategies, were prepared to contribute regularly, through “Budget Support”, to this subsidy, on the principle that emergency food-aid is even more unpredictable and costly.

Bingu, however, lacks political subtlety. He has managed simultaneously to alienate Malawi’s two main generators of foreign exchange: the international donors and the international tobacco-buyers. However understandable it may be, his very public hostility towards their representatives in Malawi: the diplomats of the western embassies in Lilongwe and the American executives of the tobacco-buying companies, Alliance One and Limbe Leaf, has been nothing short of reckless. It has shaken even the British government’s unwavering attachment to its swollen Department for International Development in Malawi. Other bilateral and multilateral agencies are taking their cue from Britain by withholding aid. Furthermore, the market for Malawi’s export staple, burley tobacco, already in serious decline, is more than a little impatient with Bingu’s futile attempts to set minimum prices on the auction floors and interfere in personnel management.

These anxieties and uncertainties have fed into the July 20 riots through the recent austerity budget of Finance Minister Ken Kandodo. Urban Malawians, who gave Bingu and his DPP-party a landslide majority in 2009, and called him the Modern Moses, now blame him for every long queue outside petrol-filling stations, every price–rise in the shops, every interruption in electricity-supply and water-supply, every time foreign exchange is unavailable in the banks, every tax-rise. Such things are becoming daily more frequent. Because of Bingu’s public face as a finger-waggng All-Wise and All-Knowing Leader, he now must personally accept the major responsibility.

Nick Wright has worked in the History Department at Adelaide University (1975-1991) and for Africa Confidential as its Malawi correspondent (2003-2010).

By Peter Gill

International responsiveness to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa has relied again on the art of managing the headlines.  Sophisticated early warning systems that foresee the onset of famine have been in place for years, but still the world waits until it is very nearly too late before taking real action – and then paying for it.

The big aid organisations, official and non-government, are right to say they have been underlining the gravity of the present emergency for months, at least from the beginning of the year.   On June 7 FEWS NET (the Famine Early Warning Systems Network funded by USAID) declared that more than seven million in the Horn needed help and the ‘current humanitarian response is inadequate to prevent further deterioration.’     Two seasons of very poor rainfall had resulted ‘in one of the driest years since 1995.’   Still the world did not judge this to be the clarion call for decisive intervention.

Three weeks later, on June 28, OCHA (the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) said that more than nine million needed help and that the pastoral border zones of Somalia, Ethiopia and Kenya were facing ‘one of the driest years since 1950/51.’  Six decades!   Two generations!  A story at last!  The media mountain moved, and the NGO fund-raisers marched on behind.

I have The Times of July 5 in front of me.  ‘Spectre of famine returns to Africa after the worst drought for decades,’ says the main headline in World news.  On page 11 there is a half-page appeal from Save the Children illustrated with a picture of a six-week old Kenyan called Ibrahim ‘facing starvation.’  On page 17 Oxfam has its own half page saying that ‘more than 12 million people have been hit by the worst drought in 60 years.’  The Times that day also carried a Peter Brookes cartoon of a hollow-faced African framed in the map of Africa, with his mouth opened wide for food.

So, for 2011, an image of Africa has again been fixed in the western consciousness.  It is an image of suffering – worse, of an impotent dependence on outsiders – that most certainly exists, but is only part of the story, even in the Horn.

The western world may understand something of the four-way colonial carve-up and the post-colonial disaster that overtook the Somali homeland, but it certainly has no proper answers to the conflicts and dislocation that lead to starvation and death.  In northern Kenya, to which so many thousands of Somali pastoralists have fled in recent months, the West does have an answer of sorts – it can feed people in the world’s largest refugee camp, in the thin expectation of better times back across the border.   Then there is Ethiopia, with several million of its own people needing help, its own Somali population swollen by refugees, and the country for ever associated with the terrible famine of 25 years ago which launched the modern era of aid.

Here it is possible to make some predictions.  There will be no widespread death from starvation in Ethiopia, not even in its own drought-affected Somali region where an insurgency promotes insecurity and displacement.  New arrangements between the Ethiopian government and the UN’s World Food Programme have insured more reliable and equitable food distribution, and the Government presses on with schemes to settle pastoralists driven by persistently poor rains from their semi-nomadic lifestyles.

The government of Meles Zenawi, which has just marked 20 years in power, has on the whole a creditable record in response to the prospect of famine.  In 2003/4 the country faced a far larger food crisis than it did it in 1984, but emerged from it with very few extra deaths.   In the former famine lands of the North where there is an impressive commitment to grass-roots development there is almost no chance of a return to the evil days of the 1970s and 1980s.

When mistakes are made, they are sometimes admitted.   Meles himself appears personally determined to combat the extreme poverty which blights his country’s reputation and is more open to discussing it than some who represent his government abroad.  After the serious food crisis in southern Ethiopia of three years ago, he told me they had failed to heed the warning signals and were simply late in their response.  More candidly still, he attributed the failure to a northern-dominated government failing properly to understand southern cropping patterns.

The questions raised by the latest African food crisis are not for Africa alone.   Ethiopia must keep addressing the image of destitution and the reality that too often underpins it, but it needs to promote other images as well.  Instead of the risk of starvation, it also needs to be able to draw attention to impressive annual economic growth figures.  Instead of food hand-outs, it also needs to be able to emphasise its big drive for inward investment.

The media can be held to account for the image it projects of Africa, and so must the aid organisations.  Unlike the press, they set themselves ‘development’ objectives.  When Meles Zenawi accepted some of the blame for underplaying the last Ethiopian food crisis, he also had harsh words for the aid-givers.     He accused UN agencies and the NGOs of magnifying the country’s problems, and added: ‘My own interpretation of the reasons for exaggerating is because they have to shock and awe the international community in order to get money.’   Another campaign of ‘shock and awe’ has just got under way.

____________________________________

Peter Gill is the author of Famine and Foreigners: Ethiopia since Live Aid published last year by Oxford University Press

According to Brown, the global financial system is not in good shape, and global growth continues to structurally marginalise poor countries. However, Africa has performed well in recent years with growth rates exceeding those of the developed world. Brown quoted Ngozi Iweala – Nigerian managing director of the World Bank – who now makes the argument for the Sub-Saharan African continental economy to be recognised as comparable to that of the existing BRIC states (Brazil, India, China – and now South Africa). She envisions a future of ‘African lions and lionesses’ rather than ‘Asian tigers.’

In this success he paid tribute to those companies that have invested in African markets, and commented upon the steady rise of inter-African and South-South trade. Particularly important in the latter phenomenon is the rise of the Asian economies, whose drive for economic development (notably that of China) has seen them invest heavily in African commodities and the infrastructure necessary for their extraction. The major questions for western investment in Africa remain political.

Whilst Brown recognises improved economic performance in Africa, he drew our attention to ‘the other side of the picture.’ His worries are concerned with the stability of this growth. Growth for the next 20 years will continue to be strong in developing African economies. In addition, Asian and African consuming power will expand, driven by the growth of middle class spending power. But large numbers of people will remain in poverty. The majority of the working population will be without educational qualifications and jobs.

Rising African populations (currently 15 percent of the world’s population, and growing to over 20 percent in the next 2 decades) still only receive 1 – 2 percent of the world’s investment, and produce 1 -2 percent of the world’s wealth.

On education and health Brown was most strident in his conviction that we can tackle global inequalities. Having advanced in the last decades, the number of children in school is now going into reverse. We must ‘train a million teachers, and build a million classrooms’, using technology more effectively to open up the world through computers.

Brown categorically asserted than we cannot tolerate a situation in which the expenditure on a child’s education in, for example, the US amounts to $100,000, whilst in Africa it is around $300.

He quoted further stark statistics regarding healthcare – in Nigeria there is one doctor per 39,000 people compared to 1 doctor per 39 people in the US. Inequity in healthcare provision in Africa is compounded by the continent having the heaviest disease burden.

Such facts illustrate the dramatic difference between Africa and the West. The Millennium Development Goals will not be achieved within any area even a century after they were implemented.

Despite some progress having been made, the gap in opportunities remains wide. According to Brown, economic empowerment is the issue.

Investment in infrastructure can greatly increase growth rates. However, there remains a huge infrastructure ‘gap’ in Africa preventing effective power supply to business, goods getting to market and further trade developing.

There is however no mechanism for solving problems of this scale. To develop solutions, we need to see them as cross border challenges. Innovative sources of finance must be explored with the World Bank taking a lead.

There is also huge economic gain to be made from technology – particularly broadband internet provision, which can help communities leap a generation in communication and education by opening up the resources of the internet to even the remotest communities.

The developed world made promises through the Millennium Development Goals. Brown stated that ‘we must honour these promises, and as global citizens, take seriously our responsibilities.’

‘Distance in not a justification for being less concerned…Empowerment not charity, economic development not aid.’

By Magnus Taylor

Photo by Siddharth Khajuria

By Myles Wickstead

One of the remarkable side-effects of the focus on Africa and international development in the lead up to the Gleneagles Summit in 2005 was the commitment of all the major UK political parties to reach 0.7% of GNI in official development assistance (oda) by 2015.  The UK’s efforts to ensure a positive Communique at the G8 meeting were largely achieved.

Fast forward to 2010.  Of the three major pillars at Gleneagles and the Make Poverty History Campaign, debt forgiveness had been a huge success. Trade had got nowhere at all.  The commitments to increase aid to Africa were mixed; the G8 had moved about halfway towards its target of increasing aid to Africa from around $25 billion per annum to $50 billion.  The record of one or two other G8 countries is truly appalling.  The UK had made very good progress under the Labour Government, but it seemed wishful thinking that this could be sustained under a new coalition Government with an agenda of cutting public spending.

Life is full of surprises, but few of them as pleasant as what transpired.  The new Government not only confimed its intention to meet its commitment, but to do so by 2013, with oda one of the few – very few – progammes to be ring-fenced, along with health.  And they have been as good as their word.
Why?  The cynics will say that this is about the Tory party trying to detoxify its brand and woo some LibDem (and perhaps Labour) voters.  Or perhaps about using the aid budget to do things which it could no longer do to achieve security and other objectives.

There may be just a smidge of this – though there must be more efficient and less expensive ways to re-brand, and what can and can’t be done with aid money is very carefully monitored and regulated by the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD.

There is a better explanation – good, old-fashioned political leadership.  The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have been clear that promises are made to be kept; the Labour Party has given the greatest possible support consistent with its responsibilities as the main party of opposition.  Increasing resources at a time of budgetary constraint is both the right thing to do and has drawn widespread admiration in both the developed and developing worlds.  Of course those ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred, and no doubt will lead to new models of development, particularly after 2015 and the review of success against the Millennium Development Goals.

Of course no-one now believes, if they ever did, that aid is the answer to development.  But it can be part of the answer.  We should perhaps see it as a non-renewable natural resource.  It is finite.  We should prepare for the post-aid world.  It should be used wisely and well.  That is the main responsibility of our development partners.  Our main responsibility is to do what we have said we will do.  That is what our leading politicians, across the political spectrum, have done and are doing.  Well done, them!

Myles A Wickstead is Head of Secretariat, Commission for Africa and Visitng Professor (International Relations) Open University.

UK Secretary of State for International Devlopment Andrew Mitchell – are the UK’s aid priorities right?

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell recently set up an Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), aimed at overseeing whether UK aid is being spent sensibly, but the main question that may be lingering in the heads of most Africans is if the British government will be able to hold African leaders who misuse foreign aid to account.

By Erick Kabendera

I was born and bred in a small town in rural Tanzania, and this is what I saw around me as I grew up:

I saw a peasant who always worked hard in his small farm but could not transport his produce to the market because the roads had not been repaired since the British colonial government left in the early 1960s.

For orphans who hoped to get school uniforms, books and school fees from grassroots religious charity organisations, which paid for the education of over a thousand children in my home town, rains and impassable roads meant that even the most generous and caring of charity workers could hardly reach them.

Expectant mothers would walk for hours on end to reach the nearest health centre, where they badly needed the services of midwives and other experts. Some had no option but to give birth in the open – on the roadsides -before reaching the village dispensary.

Those lucky enough to reach there would sometimes find the only nurse at the village health centre gone to a distant village to visit other mothers. During those few times she would be around, she seldom helped the mothers because she lacked proper training and was without the facilities needed to take a mother through a safe birth.

That was more than twenty years ago, long before I could call myself an adolescent. I am now an adult – and a journalist. My work frequently entails visiting rural families to write about their lives. I stay in poor people’s homes while there, squat with them around a plate of boiled potatoes and greasy wild vegetable soup.

I sometimes sleep in their small huts, where the air is filled with the stench of goat urine. The ruminants bleat in my ears all night long. It is from such experiences that I have discovered the bitter truth about the little aid can do to change people’s lives.

In these particular cases, what the aid had done was to widen the gap between a poorly starving African and a beer-bellied senior civil servant entrusted with donor sponsored poverty reduction programmes.

Sometimes a ten-classroom school would be built. The cost of each classroom would officially be put at £3500 or thereabouts, but it would be built with half the amount, the balance going into the wrong people’s ever hungry pockets. A year later, when the long rains set in, the school buildings would start crumbling.

Senior civil servants overseeing the construction of a number of such schools in different parts of the country would write sweet reports for consumption by unsuspecting donors. The officials would pay themselves a daily £100 or so each per day for attending meetings to deliberate on the future of school construction plans, the meetings being conveniently held twice a week.

Those involved in the implementation of the projects would compete against each other in buying ultramodern Toyota Land Cruisers, Japanese brand fuel guzzlers that no honest civil servant in a poor nation could afford even if it meant hoarding a whole lifetime’s salary.

One of them would happily shout at a pub how he would pay a staggering £30,000 the following week for his son or daughter to study at a prestigious university in London or South Africa. He would do so while juggling his Iphone in one hand and Blackberry in the other.

The conversation would be incomplete if he forgot to brag about his plan to buy a new house in a posh neighbourhood for his newly found long-legged mistress, a mere 20 years old. “Small change” – coming to a few thousand pounds – would then be deposited in an offshore account somewhere in Europe or the Americas.

President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania, a popular name with the West, admitted months ago that about 30 per cent of the government’s national budget got “lost” through corruption and embezzlement. He was in fact talking of an amount equivalent to the country’s annual budget support, a warning that the system in use had serious shortcomings and called for urgent review.

As the British Conservatives and other leaders of the world’s richest nations devise ways to meet their historic pledge to double aid to Africa, they must also think of coming up with comprehensive plans on how to make aid work better.

They need to help strengthen local councils and charities at the grassroots not only to a competitive wage but also to hold leaders who misuse aid to account. This could help end the embezzlement or misuse of British taxpayers’ money.

The author is a journalist based in Dar es Salaam.

These commentators seem oblivious to the causes of the global economic meltdown. They have forgotten that in the real world entrepreneurs can be as greedy as public officials. NGO activists do significant good even if at times their engagement has unintended consequences. The world is not defined simply by good and bad guys. In the complex world of development a balance between the priorities of business and the citizens is what can generate progress.

Let me use some examples. The great success stories of development in the post world war II period are seen as Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. In all these cases a mix of trade and aid created the enabling conditions that facilitated this end. Aid was absolutely necessary. The development of Western Europe would have been unimaginable without the role of the Marshall Aid plan. Similarly the Asian countries were a major beneficiary of US aid. UNCTAD’s Economic Development in Africa estimates that $500 million per year was given to Japan by the US between 1950 and 1970. Korea received economic and military investment that amounted to $13 billion between 1946 and 1978, whilst Taiwan received $5.6 billion.

But trade was as crucial as aid. The US provided preferential access to its markets for both Western Europe and its Asian allies. Moreover, it did not demand reciprocal access enabling these societies to develop their competitive capacities before they integrated into the global economy. This restructuring of international trade by the US in favour of its allies was crucial for the development of Western Europe and South East Asia in the post-world war II period.

But why did both the US and national elites act in ways that were systemically beneficial. Chalmers Johnson explicitly accounts for the rise of the Japanese economic model by arguing that it was essentially a product of the cold war and the competitive relations between the US and Soviet political elites. Other more recent accounts speak of systemic vulnerability generated by specific political, security, and financial conditions, and yet others highlight the role of social mobilization and extra-institutional popular action in prompting these elite coalitions in the direction of broader developmental outcomes.

These accounts demonstrate that appropriate development policies are not simply the product of good political leaders or clever technocrats. Rather they emerge within particular political circumstances that are distinguished by a dispersal of power. At the international level, competition between equally powerful states is good for development because it conditions international political elites to act in ways that favour developing nations. At the national level, the experience of West European nations, including Norway, and Asian countries like Malaysia, suggest that a robust civil society, including powerful trade unions, is important for conditioning local political elites to adopt policies and behave in ways that are facilitative of poverty alleviation and national development.

But the competitive international environment during the cold war did not benefit Africa. How then can its elites avoid a repeat of this experience? How can they ensure that they are able, like the Asians and Europeans, to use the competitive international environment to facilitate their own development? Two preconditions would be required for this outcome in this era. First, African political elites must develop the political will to pursue a comprehensive development agenda that benefit their citizens. And, as the European and Malaysian experience indicates, such a political will can emerge when the political elite are kept in check by a plural political system and/or an independent robust national civil society. Where this does not exist as in Gabon, Ethiopia and Sudan, these political elites easily become proxies for foreign powers and interests. Substantive democratization, then, facilitates the accountability of their elites to their citizens thereby enabling them to develop the political will to pursue a comprehensive developmental agenda.

Second, African political elites would have to be much more cohesive at the continental level if they are to be able to use the competitive international environment to their collective advantage. Such cohesion could emerge from initiatives towards a continental unity. What form would this take? Some would argue for a pan-African solution in the form of a United States of Africa. While such a development would be positive, it is for all practical purposes unfeasible in the short to medium term. But a Continental Charter of Rights governing investments and engagements on the continent need not be? Such a charter, which would have to be negotiated in the African Union, could supersede bilateral agreements and force all external, and maybe even continental, powers to accord to a specific set of business and diplomatic practices. Of course the administrative weaknesses and the capacity constraints of the AU may hinder compliance. But if such a charter were to be agreed to by the AU, it could be subsequently ratified in the UN, thereby extending and strengthening its institutionalization, and enhancing the reach of its compliance.

What are the lessons for Mills and McNamee? Simplistic solutions will not facilitate development. Neither will sloganeering. Lesson one: both Aid and Trade is necessary. The question is how is the Aid deployed and how is the Trade organized. Lesson two: an enabling political environment both at the national and international level is essential. How to organize the political system to enshrine accountability of political and economic elites to the citizens, and how to play off foreign powers in the competitive international environment so as to facilitate national development needs is what is at issue. Is it not time for us to get to the crux of the debate and reject fundamentalism in all its forms?

Jonathan Glennie’s book, coming in the wake of a growing number of critiques of the international aid, shows just how flimsy are the intellectual foundations of the aid-for-development experiment. Even before the financial crash, the promises of huge increases in ODA to reduce world poverty were becoming increasingly doubtful.

One of many ironies of this situation is that most of the proponents of aid—including its most ardent advocates such as Jeff Sachs—have all along promoted ODA as part of a wider package that includes debt relief, trade reform and improved economic governance in developing countries so as to generate improved investment and growth. Aid has been seen as just one of the instruments for economic growth, and arguably the least important one. But, aid seems to displace the other parts of the development debate. Of the other pillars, only debt relief has seen any significant progress in the last ten years. Trade reform and economic governance are much harder, and far less progress has been made.

Aid donors and recipients alike have good reason for preferring to focus on aid rather than trade or governance. Industrialized countries don’t want to liberalize trade in agricultural products, while making new commitments to aid targets provides popular headlines. African governments like aid because most of it comes to them, and while they are strongly in favour of trade reform they are understandably resistant to governance reform. Therefore we see that NEPAD began with a focus on governance, trade, and debt, with aid at the margins, but was reduced very rapidly to an aid disbursement mechanism.

Even before the financial crisis hit last year, the limits of the ODA-driven response to global development needs were becoming apparent. The system is geared far too much to vertical systems which can generate short-term monitorable results. It is inefficient, with dozens of parallel aid missions in recipient countries all doing much the same thing. It is open to manipulation and abuse to support other policy objectives of donors and lenders, which as Glennie explains, undermines the stated objective.

All these shortcomings are politically tolerable in donor countries. What will make the existing system unmanageable is that cannot generate or disburse the scale of funding needed to respond to mitigate the impacts of climate change, let alone finance the transition to a low-carbon energy system. However, for so long as nobody has a practicable idea for what can replace the current system, ODA seems set to continue. At the moment, that serves the purpose of pretending to get to grips with these momentous challenges.