PAGE ONE
Africa's Problems Move
To Top of Global Agenda
Blair Seeks Debt Relief, Aid,
But Bush Is More Cautious;
Slow Change in Mozambique
By ROGER THUROW
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
June 9, 2005; Page A1
Africa is moving to the forefront of the international agenda at a time when the continent is barely hanging on to the fringe of the global economy.
Amid a global push for democracy and concern about terrorism and other ills bred by failed states, the continent is to be a central issue for top world leaders at a series of coming meetings, from next month's gathering of the Group of Eight leading nations to later sessions of the United Nations General Assembly and the World Trade Organization.
Together, the summits will aim to provide a massive blast of money and trade opportunity to propel the continent's best-performing -- but still sputtering -- countries forward. Participants also are seeking ways to alleviate the humanitarian crises facing the continent, particularly widespread poverty and the rapid spread of HIV and AIDS, with which about 25 million Africans are infected, out of a sub-Saharan population of about 750 million.
Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair is taking a leading role, pushing his fellow leaders to double development aid to Africa and to forgive the continent's remaining debts when they gather at the annual summit of the world's leading industrialized countries, known as the G-8, in Scotland beginning July 6. (See related article.) He wants rich nations to increase total contributions to African development by $25 billion a year.
Mr. Blair also has been prodding President Bush to increase U.S. aid and involvement. After a meeting in Washington this week, the two described outlines of a plan to cancel at least $34 billion in debt of 27 of the world's poorest nations, including obligations to the World Bank and the African Development Bank, though no deal has been reached. The U.S. has pushed for aid to be tied to specific needs and come with strong accountability standards. (See related article.)
Mr. Bush announced an expected move to release $674 million in aid to Africa, mostly for food aid to Ethiopia and Eritrea, drawn from money already appropriated by Congress. But Mr. Blair failed to persuade him to agree to his plan to double aid to Africa from the world's richest nations by bringing forward future aid commitments. Despite Mr. Blair's urging, Mr. Bush said the U.S. already has tripled aid to Africa to $3.2 billion during his administration, adding, "We'll do more down the road."
Whether the world's wealthy nations can forge an African version of the Marshall Plan, the U.S.-led effort to rebuild Europe after World War II, is an open question. Several G-8 countries besides the U.S. are facing tight budgets themselves, including Germany. The U.S. and Europe also have been reluctant to eliminate the subsidies they pay their farmers in order to create a level plowing field for Africa's farmers.
Nor has Africa's history inspired much confidence in the past that a heavy shower of aid will land on fertile soil. The continent is littered with failed development projects, and many countries have been riven with waste and corruption. The misrule and brutal conflicts currently raging in Zimbabwe, the Congo, Sudan and Somalia have chased away foreign investors and aid organizations.
Nonetheless, Africa has become a priority for many organizations. In September, the United Nations will sound the aid alarm as it reviews its progress in achieving its Millennium Development Goals. Those goals, set at the turn of the millennium, aimed to cut poverty in half by the year 2015. Given current trends, reaching that goal will take decades in Africa.
In December, trade ministers from around the world will gather in Hong Kong, hoping to complete the broad outlines of a pact that would increase trade opportunities for developing countries. A central goal of these negotiations is improving the competitiveness of African agriculture, which is at the economic core of almost every African country.
Other world leaders have spoken on Africa as well, as have business leaders such as Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates. New World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, who is planning a trip to Africa later this month, has called transforming the continent a "priority" for his five-year term. In the background, grass-roots demonstrators and celebrity activists such as Irish rock stars Bono and Bob Geldof have been rallying to push for African aid.
"Let's not waste this opportunity," pleads William Kalema, chairman of the Uganda Investment Authority and one of 17 members of Mr. Blair's Commission for Africa, which was appointed by the prime minister to analyze Africa's slide and draw up a blueprint to reverse it. "You can't have a pocket of extreme poverty in one part of the world and rapid growth in another."
Fueling Africa's rise as a priority for many nations in recent years has been a mix of optimism and fear. Both Europe and the U.S. have been pushing more broadly for embrace of democracy by more countries, while in Africa itself new continent-wide organizations have emerged to monitor political, social and economic reform.
At the same time, some leaders worry that an ever-poorer and hungrier Africa, populated with failed states and plagued by war and disease, is a threat to global security. "We are storing up trouble for the future," the Blair commission warns. "The longer Africa's problems are left unaddressed the worse they will get."
Many also invoke a moral argument for helping Africa. "If what happens in Africa happened in any other continent in the world, there would be a complete and total outcry," Mr. Blair said in an interview earlier this year.
There are signs of progress. Mr. Blair's commission notes that in the past five years more than two-thirds of the continent's countries have held multiparty elections. Two dozen nations posted growth rates exceeding 5% in 2003. Countries such as Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, Senegal and Ghana have multiplied spending on social services such as education and health.
Yet Africa as a whole grows hungrier, sicker and poorer. With HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis and other viruses rampaging, the commission notes that life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has fallen to an average of just 46 years, retreating to 1970s levels. Africa is the only region of the developing world where food production fell in the past two decades. The continent's share of world trade declined from 6% in 1980 to less than 2% in 2002.
The challenges and opportunities for Africa can be seen in Mozambique, on the southeast coast of the continent.
A decade ago, Mozambique was on the brink of becoming a failed state following a long and brutal civil war and ruinous policies based on communist principles. But at the end of last year the country held its third consecutive democratic election.
Its new market-oriented policies have won the praise of major donors, who have also been encouraged by how the country has spent its savings from an initial round of debt relief, estimated to be about $130 million a year. In the past five years, Mozambique has built more than 2,500 schools, boosting primary school enrollment by 1.3 million pupils; vaccinated 600,000 children against some of Africa's most common killers, like measles; and wired scores of rural villages for electricity.
Large donors such as Britain, the European Union and the World Bank have been pioneering a new way of distributing aid, steering it directly into the government's general budget rather than following the traditional method of spending it themselves on their own projects. Donors say this approach sharpens the budget skills of Mozambicans and promotes greater accountability of government spending. In recent years, Mozambique's foreign aid has amounted to half of its annual budget expenditures.
Despite the assistance, Mozambique's development has lurched forward in a stop-start manner. The drive to build primary schools has left little money for improving the high schools and colleges, or even for hiring more teachers to fill the greater number of classrooms.
During a dinner with members of the Mozambique government in the capital of Maputo earlier this year, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, wondered why more and better teachers weren't being hired. The Mozambicans explained that they couldn't raise salaries to attract higher quality teachers because that would require a long-term budget increase, and they couldn't plan for that without a guaranteed boost in aid. The Mozambicans said the same was true for providing treatment to AIDS sufferers: They can't launch an effort that would stretch over decades without guarantees that the money would always be in the budget.
Since that encounter, the Blair government has made Mozambique one of its main exhibits for the potential benefits of a quantum increase in aid to Africa.
"Mozambique has done the best with what they have, but there is still so much to be done," says Eamon Cassidy, head of Britain's Department for International Development in Maputo. "We need to make funding longer-term and more predictable."
Says Adriano Pelembe, director of an agriculture technical school in Boane, an hour's drive from Maputo, "A Marshall Plan for Africa would be very good." He says his budget has more than doubled since the first burst of debt relief was granted by major creditor countries at the start of the decade, allowing the school to boost its usage of electricity and water.
But because the aid money is focused on primary schools, there hasn't been enough for Mr. Pelembe to replace rusted, broken-down equipment littering the technical school's teaching farm. They are only tools available to the schools 200 students.
At the Xipamanine health clinic in a particularly poor area of Maputo, Andre Sibinde Jr., the head of the vaccinations department, is wary as he shows off a gift from a donor. "Look at this," he says, wielding a state-of-the-art disposable syringe. "They are very good, they prevent contamination from HIV/AIDS and other diseases," he says, noting that he sometimes vaccinates 100 patients a day. "Please tell the donors to keep sending money so we can keep buying them."
But he isn't confident they will. Until he is certain of continued funding, he keeps two silver sterilization pots that once were used to clean the old reusable needles and syringes.
"We keep them just in case the money runs out," says Mr. Sibinde.
One measure of the country's progress is its bicycle sales. They have soared in recent years, with the percentage of households owning a bicycle jumping to 28% in 2003 from 13% in 1996.
That has become one of the government's leading indicators of increasing prosperity, since bikes provide more economic mobility and trading opportunities for those who otherwise would travel by foot. Over the same period, the percentage of population below the poverty line dropped by 15%. The line is generally drawn by governments and international organizations at income of $1 a day.
At the same time, government officials see the figures as a sign of how far behind the rest of the world they are. "It is a very elementary measure that shows we are starting from literally nothing," says Pedro Couto, Mozambique's director for research in the Ministry of Planning and Development.
By now, he says, the country should be measuring its progress by sales of cars, or at least motorcycles. Even with the annual foreign aid of about $700 million, more than 50% of households are still below the poverty line.
"We're improving. We can make it. But unless we have fresh resources from aid and trade, it won't get done," says Mr. Couto. "We need more help from outside."
Write to Roger Thurow at roger.thurow@wsj.com |
