Counterpoint: UN MDGS and U.S. aid to Africa: ineffective and unrealistic

International Social Science Review, Spring-Summer, 2007 by Richard Sarver

Ambitious, magnanimous, laudable, idealistic, and humanitarian--these are a few of the adjectives used to describe the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Africa, the location of many of the world's poorest nations, is generally the focal point of discussion relating to achievement of these goals. Publicly supporting the goals is chic. As leader of the 2005 (38 summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair challenged the United States and other (38 member nations to double their aid to Africa. Additionally, Blair called for canceling debts owed by poor African nations. (1) The entertainer Bono, demonstrating his commitment to the cause, has founded a lobbying organization to persuade the U.S. and other wealthy nations to increase their aid to poor African countries. (2) Economist Jeffrey Sachs, prominent in his roles as director of both Columbia University's Earth Institute and the UN Millennium Project, is, like Blair and Bono, on the more-aid-to-Africa bandwagon. He, too, has called for donor nations to double their aid to Africa while advising poor African countries to simply ignore hundreds of billions of dollars of debt. (3)

Spurred by the news media, many public figures are advocating dramatic increases in U.S. aid to Africa. These activists miss no opportunity to pique the collective American consciousness with images of starving African children, statistics on African poverty and life expectancies, and tired, shopworn cliches about how selfish Americans share only a tiny percentage of their vast wealth with inhabitants of impoverished nations. While the UN MDGs are indeed praiseworthy, they are also impractical and unattainable. The proposed time frame for their completion is years too short. The deluge-of-money approach to solving the problems of Africa has not worked; the U.S. and other wealthy nations have pumped money into Africa for several decades with little to show for it. Part of the problem is that African governments lack sufficient logistical and practical infrastructure to effectively oversee receipt and distribution of aid from donor nations. Accountability is also an issue; many African nations pegged to receive increased aid are rife with corruption while others risk falling into the trap of perpetual aid dependency. A lack of good governance also stands in the way of fulfilling the UN MDGs. Historically, strength, efficiency, and integrity have not been hallmarks of African governments. Helping Africa climb out of poverty should be a world concern, but flooding the continent with money over the next eight years is not a workable or wise solution.

Goals Unrealistic

Though difficult to imagine now, in medieval times dozens of wealthy and powerful kingdoms thrived throughout Africa. (4) Centuries of internal conflict and exploitation from outside powers have altered the natural course of Africa's social, economic, and political evolution, and have contributed to the conditions that exist on the continent today. Each of the Sisyphean tasks mandated by the UN MDGs and championed by Blair, Bono, and Sachs, is targeted for completion by 2015. The driving force behind the changes that are envisioned will be billions of dollars from wealthy donor nations. Given the scope and complexity of Africa's problems, it is naive to think that money can vanquish Africa's woes overnight. One goal in particular will not be attained: halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. In sub-Saharan Africa, an estimated 25.8 million people are infected with the disease, with millions of new infections occurring each year. (5) Peter Piot, Executive Director of the United Nations AIDS Program, has declared that while it may be possible for some countries to gain control of HIV/AIDS in the near future, it is unrealistic to believe that the spread of the disease can be reversed by 2015. (6) This is most unfortunate for the Millennium Development Project since former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stated that halting the AIDS pandemic is a prerequisite for meeting all of the other goals. (7)

Lack of Accountability

African countries already receive tremendous amounts of funding for various programs, loans, shipments of food, and outright forgiveness of debts, yet the UN is calling for a substantial increase in monetary assistance to the continent. Developed countries, according to the UN, should commit 0.7% of their gross national product to development assistance for poor countries. It insists that 0.7% is the benchmark that will enable developing countries to meet the MDGs. (8) For the U.S., this would represent more than a fourfold increase in current aid levels. (9)

For millions of people in Africa, poverty is an unpleasant reality, yet aid is, for many African countries, problematic. Nicholas van de Walle, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and specialist in both aid effectiveness and Africa, writes that public institutions in Africa often lack the resources necessary to use aid effectively. (10) Officials frequently have neither the training nor ability to evaluate critically the effectiveness of aid programs or to monitor their progress, resulting in extensive waste. Apathy on the part of government officials and aid workers is another problem. For example, in Ethiopia it is estimated that less than one-quarter of aid shipments reach the country's neediest people because government agencies simply do not bother to evaluate recipients' reliability or their distribution of aid based on need. This problem worsens in regions more remote from the political center of that country. (11)