AFRICAN governments must be held accountable for the foreign aid they receive, concluded a consultation held in Nairobi last week.
The Bishop of Bujumbura, in Burundi, the Rt Revd Pie Ntukamazina, told a conference on aid effectiveness organised by Action for Churches Together for Development, the All-Africa Conference of Churches (AACC), and the Roman Catholic Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, that accountability was critical for Africa’s economic liberation.
“It is time churches waged war in the fight against the misuse of finances. We are always seeking greater good and value out of our resources, no matter how scarce they seem to be,” he told the conference, as reported by Ecumenical News International.
“We need to ask ourselves who should be the custodian of aid in an environment of the poor governance, lack of accountability, corruption, and bureaucracy that is reflected in most African governments.”
The Third High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness will be held in Accra, Ghana, from 2 to 4 September. It will produce an action declaration that seeks to remove bottlenecks in the implementation of the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, agreed by 100 countries. The Declaration sets out 50 commitments to improving aid quality, using 12 indicators to measure improvements in aid effectiveness.
Women, however, had not benefited from development aid to Africa, a pan-African women’s rights group, Femnet, argued at the African Women’s Regional Consultation on Aid Effectiveness and Gender Equality held in Nairobi on Monday.
If more assistance was not channelled towards gender equality and women’s rights, the meeting heard, most African countries would not achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The secretary of Femnet, Fatma Alloo, said that women must be involved in determining development plans, priorities, and strategies. “Gender equality and women’s rights are not considered a priority for key stakeholders in the Accra preparation process,” Ms Alloo said.
Americans have topped the list as the most generous private donors of foreign aid to poor countries. Figures from the Hudson Institute, a think tank based in Washington, show that private donations totalled $34.8 billion in 2006.
Religious organisations in the United States donated $8.8 billion to the developing world, mostly through locally owned partnerships that achieved more lasting results than government aid had done in the past, the report found.
The results led the director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Prosperity, Dr Carol Adelman, to suggest that the traditional donor to recipient foreign aid had been “supplemented, if not supplanted”, by such public-private partnerships.
New players in global philanthropy had found “remarkable new ways to help the world’s poor”, she said. She described internet giving as “skyrocketing”: it allowed “generous Americans, Europeans, and Asians to provide fast, efficient, targeted, hands-on loans and grants to poor people overseas”.
Britain comes second in the list of givers of private aid to developing countries, at more than $1.6 billion, followed by Germany and Canada. Sweden and Finland were bottom of the 18 rich countries listed.
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