Africa's future a common goal.

In March, after a year of meetings, the Commission for Africa published its much-anticipated report “Our Common Interest”.

Likely to set the agenda for this summer’s G8 meeting in Scotland, the report recommends an “integrated package” of measures to lift sub-Saharan Africa from its predicament “not a list from which either African or rich countries can pick and choose.” These range from debt cancellation and an end to northern agricultural subsidies to action on corruption and improved governance in African countries. African voices recommend that rich countries support their continent by ending the bad policies which block development.

The message, as one commentator put it, “is that you can’t build a dam in Africa but continue to sell arms to its bad governments. You can’t give more aid but support agricultural subsidies in Europe. If you want to help, you have to sign up to the whole package.”

One morning, some 100,000 years ago, a group of early humans broke camp and set off walking north. They were somewhere by the shore of the Red Sea in what today would be northern-eastern Somalia. But in those days there was no sea. What is now the continent of Africa was joined to the rest of the world by the Sinai peninsula. From these first few individuals – the group may have been as small as 50 men, women and children – everyone in the rest of the world is descended.

For almost four million years the ancestors of humanity existed only in Africa, and nowhere else on the face of the Earth. It was here that the first tools and axes were made, and that men and women learned to make fire. It was here that the branch of our forebears which was to end up as homo sapiens broke away from the branch that was to remain as apes. Africa is the parent to all humanity, and like so many parents is often treated with ingratitude by children who should know better. The relationship between the continent which gave birth to humankind and the rest of the world has been problematic ever since.

To the outside world Africa is a place of contradictions. A survey of schoolchildren in one Western country recently was asked what they associated with the continent. In reply they listed: savages, drums, spears, pygmies and poisoned darts. By contrast, the more educated Western imagination cherishes fables of the Queen of Sheba and Prester John, and the realities that were the great Egyptian, Nubian, Axumite and Ashanti empires. Yet, it must be acknowledged, the overwhelming perceptions of Africa among outsiders come from the pictures of famine, disease, coups, war, genocide and fly-blown poverty that fill Western television screens – images such as those of the Ethiopian famine of 1984/5, which Live Aid broadcast to 98 per cent of all the television screens in the world. Many Western minds believe, mistakenly, that nothing has changed in those two decades.

There is, of course, no single ‘right’ view of the complexity that is Africa. Africa is many places, as is reflected in the French expression les Afriques. But there are clearly ‘wrong’ or outdated views of the continent. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, the Roman scholar Pliny famously said. Out of Africa always something new. And what is new – contrary, perhaps, to the expectations of many people – is good news.

In one African country after another evidence is emerging of a changing order. Twenty years ago it was a commonplace for African countries to be run as military dictatorships; today such governments are a comparative rarity. A new generation of political leaders is emerging, many of whom share a vision of the common good of their people. The World Bank reports the beginnings of a general improvement in standards of effective and open governance among many African governments.

On the economic front, despite three decades of overall continental stagnation, 16 countries in sub-Saharan Africa have seen average growth rates above four per cent in the last decade. Pockets of real wealth have appeared. A new entrepreneurialism is evident. In places across Africa a burgeoning middle class can be seen. A rich variety of organisations not run by governments is blossoming, dealing with a wide range of issues on environmental, cultural, human rights, sustainability issues and the empowerment of women. These organisations are active in changing the world around them, but they are also developing the expertise to hold their governments answerable to the needs of their peoples.

So what has changed? For a start the geo-political context. The years of stagnation were those when the continent was dominated by the military rule of corrupt dictators. This was the era of the Cold War during which both super-power blocs supported corrupt dictators who stuffed their own personal Swiss bank accounts with money looted from the African people. The infectious optimism which swept the continent at independence turned then into a deep and widespread cynicism. Today, both across the continent and outside it, cynicism is the greatest enemy of development for the poorest peoples of Africa.

But the Cold War is over. Apartheid has crumbled. A new self-assurance is sweeping the African continent. Change is starting everywhere. Many more reforms are needed but, the Commission for Africa has concluded, that if this change continues then aid could be doubled – by $25 billion a year in the first instance – and spent more effectively than ever before. To do that will require a new partnership between Africa and the rich world. For its part, Africa must accelerate reform of its systems of governance. And the developed world must increase and improve its aid, and stop doing those things which hinder Africa’s progress.

When people speak of bad governance they most often think of unsound government policies and the rot of corruption. Africa has had its problems with those, which the Commission addresses, but by far the biggest weakness lies in something less dramatic.

The Commission found that Africa lacks “capacity”, by which it means poor systems and incentives, inadequate information-gathering systems, technical inability, untrained staff and lack of money – in other words the administrative machinery which is taken for granted by the citizens of developed nations. That is why one of the Commission’s main recommendations is that donors make a major investment to improve Africa’s capacity – starting with its system of higher education (particularly in science and technology) and working through the building of systems and staff in local and national governments, and also in pan-African organisations, particularly the African Union and its New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) programme. Donors also need to change their own behaviour, for they all too often put in place their own mechanisms parallel to government ones which undermine African attempts to build capacity.

Other key Commission recommendations on governance include improving systems by which African states answer to their people. That means strengthening parliaments, the media, trade unions and the judiciary. And the participation of ordinary people in government processes must be increased. Also essential is making budgetary processes more open, so citizens can see where money is being allocated and see it is spent as promised. Such transparency will help expose corruption, which African governments must show the political will to root out. Developed nations can help in this too. Money stolen by corrupt leaders in the past must be repatriated. Foreign banks must be obliged by law to inform on suspicious accounts. Those who give bribes should be dealt with too; foreign companies, especially those in the oil and mining industries, must be pressed to publish what they pay to governments. And firms who bribe should be refused export credits. The Commission concluded that without progress in governance, all other reforms will have limited impact.

The most extreme failure of governance is violent conflict. Africa is no longer afflicted by wars to the same extent as in the recent past, but in many countries conflict is still the biggest single obstacle to development. Until now the international community has put most of its efforts into peacekeeping, humanitarian relief and post-war reconstruction. Preventing conflict not only saves lives, it is cheaper. For that reason the Commission proposes a shift in emphasis to conflict prevention. That means using aid better to tackle the causes of conflict. It means international agreements on how to control the trade in diamonds, oil and other resources which fuel or fund hostilities.

It means controlling the trade in small arms. It means building the capacity of African states and wider regional groupings to prevent and manage conflict – and in post-conflict situations to build peace to prevent states from sliding back into armed hostilities.

Africa is poor, ultimately, because its economy has not grown. This is not because its people lack entrepreneurial talent, but because the right framework has not existed to allow that talent to be unleashed. Again the problem is governance. States have not created the right climate to encourage individuals and firms, domestic and foreign, to invest. The African Union’s NEPAD programme has schemes to build public/private partnerships to create that climate. But it needs backing from donor nations – who should also double their spending on infrastructure – from rural roads and small-scale irrigation to slum upgrading and larger projects including regional highways, railways, power plants and information and communications technology.

But care must be taken to ensure that growth does not exclude poor people. Poverty is more than just a lack of material things. It is also about being excluded from decision-making and from the basic services the state ought to provide. The massive investment required in infrastructure must have special emphasis on agriculture since 80 per cent of the poor earn their living from farming. It should also help small enterprises, with a particular focus on women and young people. The programme for growth takes over a third of the extra aid the Commission is calling for.

The biggest proportion of the proposed increase, however, goes in health, education and schemes to protect the most vulnerable. Almost half of the extra $25 billion in aid should be spent here. The poorest people in Africa need schools and clinics. This is a matter of basic human decency. But it is also sound economics: because a healthy and skilled workforce is a more productive one. Investing for economic growth means rebuilding Africa’s health and education systems, many of which are now on the point of collapse. The international community needs to properly fund the commitments it has made to the Education for All programme to provide all girls and boys in sub-Saharan Africa with basic education. Primary school fees should be abolished, and funding for other parts of the education system increased. There will be no improvements in the ability of government ministries without an educated corps of civil servants.

Major investments are also needed in health to train staff and develop new medicines for the diseases which particularly afflict Africa. Years of decline in the funding of clean water and sanitation must be reversed. Top priority must be given to AIDS which is killing more people in Africa than anywhere else in the world. Malaria and TB should be targeted, along with other preventable killer diseases. Initiatives against individual diseases, however, will be to no avail without the rebuilding of the health systems on which all of this depends. Fees paid by patients should also be scrapped.

One of the main brakes on economic growth is the fact that Africa does not trade enough with the rest of the world. It faces two major constraints here. It does not produce enough goods, of the right quality or price, to enable it to break into world markets. And it faces indefensible trade barriers which, directly or indirectly, tax its goods as they enter the markets of the rich world.

To improve its capacity to trade, Africa needs to make changes internally. It must improve its transport infrastructure to make goods cheaper to move. It must reduce and simplify the tariff systems between one African country and another. It must reform excessive bureaucracy, cumbersome customs procedures, and corruption by public servants. It must make it easier to set up businesses. It must improve the way African nations work with one another in the continent’s regional economic communities. Donors can help fund these changes.

But the rich nations must also dismantle the barriers they have erected against African goods, particularly in agriculture. They must abolish export subsidies to European, American and Japanese agribusiness which give it an unfair advantage over poor African farmers. They must lower tariffs and other barriers to African products. And they must do all this in an ambitious completion of the current Doha Round of world trade talks, in a way which does not demand reciprocal concessions from poor African nations. Careful attention must be given to ensure that the poorest people are not badly hurt by any trade liberalisation measures agreed in the trade talks. And Africa must be provided with the funds that can help it adjust to the new opportunities of a changed world trading regime.

All this will cost. To support the changes that have begun in Africa, the Commission has called for an extra $25 billion per year in aid until 2010. When that produces the results that the Commission feels confident it will, then there should be a second increase, with a further $25 billion a year to be paid by 2015. Ensuring the money is well-spent will depend on two factors. First, good governance in Africa must continue to advance. But, second, donors must significantly improve the quality of aid and how it is delivered: that means more grants, more predictable and untied aid, and donor processes that are less burdensome on the already stretched administrations of African countries. It must also be better harmonised with the aid of other donors and better in line with the priorities, procedures and systems of African governments. Above all, it must be given in ways that make governments answerable primarily to their own people. And all these strictures apply not only to individual donor governments but also multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in which, the Commission insists, there need to be reforms.

Action is needed too on debt, for the money Africa pays to service its debts is in effect negative aid. For every $2 Africa currently receives in aid, it pays back nearly $1 in debt payments. For poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa the objective must be 100 per cent debt cancellation as soon as possible.

The problems Africa faces are interlocking. They are vicious circles that reinforce one another. They must therefore be tackled together. To do that requires a comprehensive ‘big push’ on many fronts at once. The actions proposed by the Commission therefore constitute a coherent package for Africa, not a shopping list from which donor nations can pick and choose. Moreover to provide the critical mass of aid which is needed now, the aid should be front-loaded. The Commission has recommended that this should be done by backing the British government’s plan for an International Finance Facility. How rich nations arrive at finding the money needed may vary. But the need for them all to proceed with urgency is clear enough.

That small group of our common ancestors who one morning, a hundred millennia ago, left Africa and set off to colonise the rest of the world remind us of our common past. The rich nations now have a moral duty – as well as a powerful motive of self-interest – to ensure that from that common past a common future grows.

Paul Vallely is a former Africa correspondent of The Times and now Associate Editor of The Independent.

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