Africa, Development & Aid, Europe, Headlines, Poverty & SDGs

DEVELOPMENT: ‘African Countries Should Get Down to Work’

Linus Atarah

HELSINKI, Feb 12 2004 (IPS) - Mao Tsetung once told former World Bank president Robert McNamara that “we plan to quadruple our GNP even without help from you.” Africans are now being told to do as Mao said.

“African countries should not wait for foreign aid,” says chairman of the development assistance committee of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a group of industrialised nations.

Insufficient aid flow and lack of foreign investment are not entirely to blame if African countries fail to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Manning said at the launch of a report he submitted to the OECD in Helsinki this week.

“If Africans prefer to invest their monies in property in offshore and Swiss accounts, they shouldn’t expect foreign investment to salvage them,” he said. Manning has spent several years working on development cooperation in Africa and Asia.

But while calling on African countries to reduce aid dependency, Manning also called on donors to take into account the development dimension of aid.

If they fail to do that, “much of our spending will be merely offsetting the costs imposed on our partners by other policies of our own governments,” he said. “This is undesirable in principle and certainly should not be allowed to happen by inattention.”

The OECD countries need to pursue policies “as if development matters”, he emphasised.

The prime goal among the eight MDGs set out at the Millennium summit in 2000 is to halve the proportion of people living in absolute poverty by 2015, in relation to 1990. By United Nations estimates 1.2 billion people live in absolute poverty, on less than one dollar a day that is. Achieving the set target would bring that number down to 890 million.

Current indicators suggest that this goal can be met, but due largely to the good performance by Asian and South East Asian countries who have the largest population of people still living in poverty.

“Africa remains the test case for the donor community,” Manning told IPS later. Benin, Uganda, and Mozambique that have recorded strong economic growth are well on track to hit the poverty reduction target by the set date, he said. But Africa as a whole has slipped far behind.

Growth in Africa is slow because of small markets in small countries, he said. “Serious regional economic integration is part of the answer.”

The other part is assistance, he said. Estimates by the World Bank and other institutions suggest that 100 billion dollars in aid is needed to meet the MDGs. But current aid flows stand at 58 billion dollars.

If all the pledges made by the developed countries at the Monterrey conference on financing for development in Mexico in 2002 are met, that would bring in about 75 billion dollars, still leaving a shortfall of 25 billion dollars, Manning said.

Kalle Laaksonen from the Pellervo Economic Research Institute, a Finnish think-tank, said the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) provides the basis for more African self-sufficiency. He said closer regional integration in Africa would increase the size of African markets and attract more foreign investors.

But reaching self-sufficiency “essentially involves a change of attitude and mentality,” he told IPS. “Africans have to reach a stage where the predominant thinking becomes ‘we Africans can do it by ourselves’.”

But solutions are not that simple, says Prof Pertti Haaparanta from the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration. Regional integration can mean closing off African countries in other regions and hurting them economically, he said.

“African countries cannot succeed by trading with each other alone,” Haaparanta told IPS. Only unimpeded access to markets in developed countries can be a key to their success, he said.

“Irrespective of the level of success in regional integration, African markets would still not provide sufficient revenue because of low purchasing power of their populations and the lower prices of goods,” he said. “But the rich northern markets would provide higher prices.”

 
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