Bono and Henry Hyde on Africa

Bono on Africa:

The Australian reports:

POP superstar Bono has urged leaders at the upcoming G8 summit - especially US President George W. Bush - to offer a generous aid package to bring about a "historic breakthrough" for the world's poor.

"Those of us who have been working on development issues - and Africa in particular - are holding out that this could be a historic breakthrough, a real sea change on issues facing the poorest of the poor," he said.

Read it here.

Bono is particularly hard on Dubya for not supporting this "historic breakthrough" approach to Africa's problems, calling him "the hardest nut to crack." But Bush rightly points out that he has tripled US assistance to Africa over his predecessors. That isn't enough for Bono, though. He is pushing for a massive one-time effort that will transform the continent.

Congressman Henry Hyde points out why Bono's approach is flawed, and explains why the Bush Administration is less than thrilled by Tony Blair's aid to Africa initiative.

[Britain] is pushing for an "International Finance Facility", or IFF, that would use international bond markets to raise $50 billion in development funds for each of the next few years, with donors committing future aid budgets to pay off the bonds in the out-years.
....

We already have a framework for confronting Africa's ills. In Monterrey, Mexico, in early 2002, the developed nations agreed to a new bargain with the world's underdeveloped nations: donors would increase aid spending and the world's poor nations would carry out economic and political reforms to ensure that development assistance money gets spent effectively and achieves observable outcomes. Simple something-for-nothing handouts would end.

The IFF undermines the spirit of the Monterrey Consensus by focusing on the tin-cupping of financing the enterprise rather than crafting a strategy for achieving the desperately needed outcomes the enterprise is intended to provide. Given the servicing on borrowed funds, paying interest to investors, and the likelihood of decreased funding by donors after the big push, Africa will actually experience a net loss of aid flows in the long term.

Further, the concentration on a blanket call for aid funds creates a distraction from the sometimes painful responsibilities of developing countries to adopt the reforms, transparency, and capacity building necessary to enable a greater degree of self-sufficiency. Why should a country like Uganda, considered one of Africa's development success stories, take steps to trim any of its 70 cabinet ministries or other parts of its bloated public bureaucracy when international donors continue to pay 50 per cent of its national budget?

We must no longer treat Africa as a ward of the developed world. We must no longer espouse the welfarism of patting the continent on the head, muttering "poor Africans" while opening our wallets so we can sleep better at night thinking we've made a difference when we haven't. No nation ever spent its way out of poverty by cashing foreign aid cheques.

Instead, we should focus our partnerships on committed African leaders who are actively implementing the kinds of policies and actions necessary for home-grown economic growth and poverty reduction. African leaders genuinely concerned about the betterment of their country focus on trade, private investment, technology, democratic and economic reform, and other core drivers of lasting economic growth - and how to become less dependent on the whims of Western handouts. Such leaders and their countries deserve increased levels of targeted assistance to support them as they wrestle through their development challenges with their own solutions.

Well said!

Accountability, not Bush, is the tough nut that has to be cracked before efforts to aid Africa can be expected to produce sustained results.

Read the whole thing here.

The philosophical differences between the two approaches are outlined by David Brooks here.