Promised aid must arrive or millions die
Chris Tomlinson
NAIROBI, Kenya — Promises of aid to Africa must be kept in
2006 or millions of people will die needlessly, the top U.N. adviser
on poverty said Monday while insisting that every penny must be
accounted for to ensure it is used properly.
Jeffrey Sachs, who is director of the U.N. Millennium Project and
special adviser to Secretary-General Kofi Annan, called 2005 the
year of promises, after the leaders of the world’s wealthiest
countries promised to double aid to Africa.
“2006 has to be the year of real action on the ground,”
Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, told
The Associated Press.
“Significant, targeted investments (aimed) at raising food
production in Africa, at addressing urgent health needs, at making
investments in water management would allow an escape from what
is now a seemingly endless cycle of disaster.”
But donors will condemn millions to death if they again fail to
deliver on their aid pledges, he said.
“This missing aid, which was promised by donors for so long
but not yet delivered, is really a life and death issue, nothing
less than that,” he said.
Critics have said that aid to Africa has been largely wasted through
widespread corruption and that there is no reason to believe new
aid would not also be misused. Sachs argued that rich countries
have themselves misspent aid money and have never lived up to their
promise, made in 1970, to spend 0.7 percent of their gross national
products to help poor countries.
“If they follow through on that, there is enough (money) to
overcome the hunger deficit; to fight malaria, AIDS, tuberculosis
and other killer diseases; to build basic infrastructure and to
enable impoverished countries to start climbing the ladder of development,”
he said.
Sachs cited a project he has been directing in Kenya called the
Millennium Village Project as an example of how aid can be successful,
if a comprehensive and accountable approach is taken. He said food
production had risen more than 300 percent and the village was working
its way out of absolute poverty.
His stop in Kenya was part of a six-country African tour promoting
the Millennium Village approach with the goal of instituting it
elsewhere.
“If we take a proper, hardheaded and businesslike approach
to the issues of disease, poverty and hunger, there are practical
solutions,” Sachs told the AP.
“They don’t involve blank checks coming from donor countries
to poor countries, they don’t involve the other side haranguing
poor countries about their poverty.”
Sachs said most Americans vastly underestimate how much the U.S.
government spends on aid to poor countries.
“The United States, for all of Africa, is spending something
like $4 billion this year, and a lot of that is on American consultants,
so most of that doesn’t really reach Africa,” he said.
“That is for a $10 trillion economy.”
He said that if the cost of food purchased from American farmers
and money spent within the United States is subtracted, less than
one penny out of every $100 actually makes it to Africa in aid.
“We should not be giving aid when it will not work, we should
be giving aid when it is going to be managed transparently, fairly
and accountably,” Sachs said.
“We should not give blank checks and we should not believe
we run other people’s countries.”
(Associated Press)
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