CALGARY -- U.S. efforts to help African countries on its own, with one-off donations for AIDS and education, are hampering efforts by the Group of Eight to move forward on joint efforts to tackle poverty, a top United Nations official says, daring to say publicly what many G8 officials are saying privately.
"It is a problem because it cuts off the United States from the influence it could have on these multilateral initiatives, and it tends to fragment the resources rather than getting them in a coherent way behind some well-thought-out initiative," said Mark Malloch Brown, the top administrator of the United Nations Development Program.
An aid plan for Africa will be one of the main agenda items this week as Prime Minister Jean Chrétien plays host to G8 leaders, including U.S. President George Bush, in Kananaskis, Alta.
Last week, Mr. Bush announced $100-million (U.S.) in aid for education in Africa, over five years, and $500-million to fight the AIDS pandemic on the continent.
Other donors and recipients alike are quick to say they are grateful for the money, but neither of the donations is part of the United Nations' organized drive to educate all children in Africa and reverse the spread of AIDS by 2015.
Canada's efforts to push the UN-led initiative Education for All have come head to head with Mr. Bush's preference for bilateralism in recent weeks, sources say. A high-profile, year-old anti-AIDS fund, also spearheaded by the United Nations, has managed to collect only 7 per cent of the money it needs.
The Canadian government had to do a major rethinking of the entire G8 summit earlier this year, when it became clear that the United States would not join in Canada's initial plan to have the eight leaders -- from Canada, the United States, Russia, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy -- make a group donation of aid to Africa at the summit.
Instead, the approach now is to have the leaders agree generally that education, anti-AIDS initiatives and fighting poverty in Africa are laudable goals, but for each country to decide for itself how much to donate and through what program. The countries will make individual announcements after the two-day summit is over on Thursday.
The problem with such a fragmented approach is that it leaves poor countries using their thin bureaucracies to monitor and distribute aid from multiple donors rather than concentrating on putting the aid to good use, officials say.
Mr. Malloch Brown's agency, the UN development program, was asked by the G8 to put together a report on the state of African development, and to say whether the continent is progressing toward goals agreed upon by the United Nations' members to halve by 2015 the number of people whose income is less than a dollar a day.
The report, released this month, shows progress in sub-Saharan Africa is abysmal, with 300 million people trying to survive on less than that. It concludes that if current trends continue, the number of poor people in the region will be higher in 2015 than it was in 1990 and will make up nearly half the poor in the developing world.
The limited amount of progress that was made in the region has largely bypassed the poor and served to help the rich.
But the report also concludes that the trends can be reversed if rich countries, such as the G8, increase their aid and target it wisely.
"If the legacy of our generation is to be more than a series of broken promises, then committed leadership, stronger partnerships, extra money, and deeper participation by the poor are needed to bring the region back on track," the report says.
In an interview, Mr. Malloch Brown said the G8 countries are making the right types of noises on education, and appear willing to discuss more money to reverse the spread of AIDS, but they have neglected to deal with a critical problem for Africa: infrastructure.
"One of the unpopular things they [African leaders attending the summit] will be saying this week in Canada, which the G8 don't want to hear, is that they need the infrastructure," he said.
"The G8 is very much at the software end of this at the moment -- education, governance, trade agreements, health support -- but is not at the hardware end, which is: You can give a trade break to a poor African country, but if it doesn't have the roads and its neighbour doesn't have the ports to get those goods out for export at a reasonable cost, it still amounts to a cruel deception."
G8 donors steered away from financing roads, bridges, dams and railways in Africa in the 1990s, after watching many projects go awry with corruption or misplaced tied aid. Total aid per capita fell, as the G8 countries steered their money in different directions, Mr. Malloch Brown said.
Now it is growing again. But the G8 has yet to recover its courage for infrastructure projects.
"In the end, you can't do it without roads and ports and telecommunications," he said.
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