In an article in The Economist Jeffrey Sachs argues, that even a relatively small increase in aid financing to promote Africas economy could save billions in future aid, reports the information gateway, Eldis.
The internationally known development-economist argues that current aid plans for Africa, such as Americas new Millennium Challenge Account, will be much too small to address the continent’s financing needs.
He outlines a series of steps to improve donor approaches:
A first step is to identify plausible African partners. Thanks to the peer review offered by the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) a growing and significant number of African countries have the quality of leadership and governance to achieve economic development and to fight terrorism. These include Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Benin, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania.
A second step is to acknowledge the fact that these countries lack the means, including roads, electricity, health care and teachers needed to break out of poverty.
A third step is a detailed “needs assessment”, which has never been done for Africa. Findings of a small preliminary survey suggest that unmet need for each of these six countries could be as little as 9 billion US dollar per year in addition to current aid flows, far less than what was targeted for Iraq alone.
The last step is to set in motion a process in which the above elements are combined. The key lies in a multilateral approach to helping Africa, and America is the biggest missing element for greater multilateral assistance
Sachs suggests that the International Development Association (IDA) should be the focal point for revamping and expanding aid flows. It recommends that the IDA should be strengthened in four ways:
Most importantly instead of 8 billion US dollar, IDAs annual programmes should be up to 25 billion dollar, with around half of that going to Africa.
IDA needs to make grants rather than loans to the poorest recipients, which would include almost all of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The American government called for grants rather than loans to finance Iraqs recovery so as not to encumber future Iraqi generations, and the same principle applies even more emphatically for impoverished Africa.
IDA should work with the aid recipients on strategies that have a time horizon long enough to carry them from today to 2015 when they are supposed to meet the Millennium Development Goals.
IDA can and should focus even more on measurable, monitorable and proven intervention, including roads, soil nutrients, anti-malaria bednets, to name a few, which in combination enable a country to break free of poverty, argues Sachs.
Kilde: www.eldis.org
