Feature Article

Tilting the world towards Africa

Critics of this summer?s crusade to combat poverty in the South say that upping aid budgets is throwing good money after bad. Not so, says Cafod?s policy expert. Aid, debt relief and trade justice work and work well

Ask a Cafod partner from Africa, or even a bishop, about their most difficult problems and they are more likely to reply by mentioning venal and high-handed local officials or abuses by national leaders than high levels of debt service or the deficiencies of foreign aid. But don?t be diverted by this entirely understandable response.

Life on the ground in Africa is hard, infrastructure is unreliable and corruption widespread. But those who have used these undeniable facts to try to scorn this summer?s crusade to force the leaders of the world?s richest countries to deliver more and better aid, debt cancellation and trade justice are missing the point. Make no mistake; aid works, debt relief works and fair trade works.

After nearly half a century of being trapped in what many see as a begging-bowl culture, the continent that is home to more than 700 million, around a seventh of the world?s people, is still plagued by what Tony Blair in the White House this week called ?poverty and deprivation?. In this light it is no surprise that the Make Poverty History campaign has met with a mixed response ? ranging from white-banded enthusiasm to world-weary scepticism that anything can ever work in Africa.

Make Poverty History has understandably concentrated on the needs of developing countries rather than their shortcomings and, it?s true, we find the ?C? word, corruption, the most difficult to deal with. The stock response is that we in the rich countries of the North should bring pressure to bear on the areas of policy that we can change ? aid, debt and trade rules ? but that problems of governance are beyond our reach and properly are the responsibility of Africans. That now, perhaps, is changing with the ?350 million aid package announced by the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, and President George Bush being linked to anti-corruption issues and the urge to democracy.

However, those sceptical of the benefits of aid still like to portray Make Poverty History campaigners as naive idealists stirred only by images of hunger, who ignore the billions clawed from the natural riches of the African earth together with millions already donated in aid and salted away by corrupt leaders for their personal benefit. But Make Poverty History is providing a powerful moral and political impetus to a string of recommendations made by the United Nations, the World Bank, academic studies and, most recently, the Commission for Africa, that aid has to double if most countries are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted nearly five years ago by the United Nations General Assembly.

These goals ? such as eradicating hunger, promoting universal primary education and gender equality, reducing child mortality and improving maternal health and combatting HIV/Aids and other mortal diseases ? may appear ambitious. But in the real world, which spends more than $1,000 billion a year on arms and armies, they are astonishingly modest ? for example, by 2015 to halve the proportion of the people, now around 1.2 billion, who have to survive on a dollar a day or less or to ensure that every child receives a primary education.

So there are two principal answers to the sceptics: the first is that aid does lift people out of poverty, and the second is that, if sceptics are sincere about overcoming corruption and bad governance, there is plenty for them to do here in the North.

One good example of the help aid brings is the eradication of diseases such as smallpox and river blindness. Aid is also crucial in efforts to turn the tide against HIV/Aids ? in prevention, treatment and the care of the millions of children orphaned by the pandemic.

Meanwhile debt relief for Tanzania enabled the government to make primary education free. More than two million children can now go to school, and now new schools and classrooms are being built. In Benin debt relief is paying for staff at rural clinics across the country, and in Mali the debt relief dividend has paid for the recruitment of 5,000 community teachers.

These are the sort of improvements that Gordon Brown has in mind when he talks, as he will have been doing yesterday and today at a meeting of the G8 finance ministers and Central Bank governors in London ahead of next month?s summit in Gleneagles, of the $50 billion a year needed to achieve the MDGs. This is the magnitude of the resources needed to upgrade entire health and education systems and to improve the infrastructure that will enable African countries to trade successfully in the future.

But aid also works at the micro level ? our own Department for International Development, working through Camfed, a non-governmental organisation specialising in female education, is supporting rural girls? schooling in northern Ghana. If the girls have completed three years of primary school, this funding helps them over the next six years of their education, and covers needs such as uniforms, fees and stationery. Community surgeries and grassroots committees have also been set up, where chiefs, leaders, teachers, parents and children can explore the reasons why girls were not at school and support those that were. Teachers in the 113 participating schools were trained as counsellors to see to the girls? welfare and parents have also been involved. As a result 3,000 girls in the Northern Region have been able to attend school. Without this support they would not have had the opportunity.

Clearly, at both continental and local levels aid and debt relief are being seen to work, which brings us to the second response to those aid sceptics. If criticism of the shortcomings of developing countries is to be taken seriously, an agenda for local African action on corruption and bad governance must be drawn up. No doubt it will be lengthy and politically challenging, but it is essential. But this agenda for action in Africa must also be matched by greater efforts in the North. Scepticism about aid is too often a pretext for not providing aid anyway.

Such an agenda begins with transparency and accountability: if the public is informed about resources flowing into government, they can hold the government to account for the use that they make of them. These resources take many forms and include the revenues and royalties paid by mining and oil companies, aid, and citizens? taxes.

In Angola, up to 2003 at least, about $1 billion a year of revenues from oil companies were unaccounted for by government. In March this year Archbishop Zacar?as Kamwenho, President of the Justice, Peace and Migration Commission of Angola, came to London to plead for greater transparency of payments made by the oil industry to the government. ?For us?, he said, ?it is important that civil society and churches should take an interest in the use to which these resources are put, in combating poverty and in national reconstruction.?

There is, however, a quartet of measures that should be taken by northern governments before we start demanding African government to change, beginning with this simple remedy: oil and mining companies should be obliged by law to publish what they pay to their host governments. But there have been objections, and outright opposition, from both oil companies and governments. Second, northern governments should abolish the tax havens where corrupt rulers have been able to hide illicit payments. The British Government has a particular responsibility since about half of the world?s tax havens are under British jurisdiction or, like the Bahamas or the Cayman Islands, retain a connection with Britain. A good first step would be to require complete openness to other tax authorities ? no more numbered or unnamed bank accounts.

Third, we should require our governments to be much tougher in prosecuting companies that violate anti-corruption laws. Although the UK has signed the convention of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) on combating bribery and, in 2002, included anti-corruption provisions in the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act, there has yet to be a prosecution for bribery. The UK was one of nine countries singled out for criticism by the OECD for not taking this issue sufficiently seriously. And finally, the sceptics should act to reduce conflicts that have destroyed the hopes for development of so many Africans by working for an effective arms trade treaty that would choke off the supply of weapons to war-torn areas.

If we in donor countries can make this progress, then we can call upon Africans to set higher standards of transparency, accountability and governance. That in turn requires a well-informed and self-confident civil society ready to challenge government. This is a tall order in many African countries. However, development ministries and institutions such as the World Bank can be much tougher in calling for the involvement of civil society in eradicating poverty and monitoring government spending.

When the G8 met three years ago in Kananaskis in Canada, the leaders put their names to the G8 Africa Action Plan, stating: ?? no country genuinely committed to poverty reduction, good governance and economic reform will be denied the chance to achieve the Millennium Goals through lack of finance?. As long as the first two conditions are met and the economic reforms are freely chosen, aid and debt relief will provide the momentum towards halving extreme poverty and achieving the other development goals. It remains to be seen whether under Tony Blair?s chairmanship the leaders of these wealthy countries meeting again, this time in Scotland at the beginning of July, will be able to move farther down this long but vital road.

George Gelber is head of public policy at Cafod.