What Africa really needs from Development Aid is Socio-economic Transformation

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By George Musiime.

April 28-29 coincided with the 2024 International Development Association (IDA) for Africa Heads of States summit held in Nairobi Kenya and similar to the ones before, this year’s summit happened at a time when the continent was still struggling. Struggling to address challenges arising from infrastructure deficiencies,  funding gaps, security threats and threats from climate change, as well as the after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.  What was unique about  this summit though,  was that it  took place just a few months after the G77+China summit held in Kampala earlier this year. Thus, it came as no surprise when Africa made a bold call, more so, in a unified voice to IDA regarding what Africa truly needs to realize from Development assistance. This call was driven home through the speech of the Chairman of the G77+China and   Ugandan president, H.E Yoweri Museveni.

A history of the crisis in Africa: In his momentous speech that was in sync with the position of the G77+China, H.E Museveni noted that the crisis in Africa has been brewing since the dawn of Africa’s independence in the 1960s. Surprisingly, so little  had been achieved  in as far as resolving this crisis. In fact leaders at the summit wondered  how after 60 years, no African country had graduated out of the IDA. Moreover, for this little impact, the leaders faulted a financial system designed with profiteering in mind other than prosperity. In other words, leaders at the summit reiterated the pronouncement of the G77+China that the global financial system was out of date, out of touch and out of step with today’s global challenges. In an example, H.E Museveni cited the World Bank’s inclination to finance capacity building which might have rightly been a necessity in an Africa that was starting out on the daunting journey of self-governance. However, he expressed doubt in whether it was what the continent needed to day. Instead, he made the argument that following more than sixty years of capacity building , it was time to turn our focus towards socio-economic transformation.

In line with this, the summit concurred that Africa needed cost effective transportation, power generation, and low-cost manufacturing, as opposed to capacity building as a path to   a transformed Africa. Meanwhile, as the World Bank is ever more likely to fund projects that have minimal impact on the ordinary African, H.E Museveni gave props to China for not merely realizing the continent’s infrastructure needs but also becoming a leader in taking that direction as well.  Today, there is evidence of this all across the continent where Chinese funding has yielded over 13,000Km in new and rehabilitated railways, over 100,000Km in highways, more than 50 large scale power facilities two of which are in Uganda,  and several industrial parks all across  Africa.  Thus china’s cooperation in Africa targets some of the continent’s acute problems including socio-economic transformation and the age-old dilemma of trade deficits.

Moreover, related to China’s vision  of building a community of humanity with a shared future, the leaders agreed that more impactful development financing would work for equality and fairness, hence building a world where the IDA might not be needed. However, this to happen, the world have to be open to doing development financing that was driven by prosperity and not profiteering!

Therefore, in their solemn call  African heads of states   seemed to point it out   to the IDA and other Bretton Woods institutions that it was not hard to do transformative development financing. In fact, there is proof to the fact  that China has been doing the same for the past 20 years, driving socio-economic transformation across the continent through investments that address the  economic bottlenecks that have curtailed Africa’s progress since independence. Thus the leaders implored the IDA and World Bank to consider financing railways for cost efficient transportation alternatives, Hydropower projects, to address current and prospective energy needs of an industrialized Africa, irrigation to mitigate the growing challenges of erratic weather patterns etcetera. In reality, China has been doing this; with railways in Tanzania, Djibouti, Kenya, Nigeria, Ethiopia, etcetera. Also, hydropower stations in Uganda, Nigeria,  Ghana and elsewhere. Moreover, through  the China, FAO and Uganda South-South cooperation as one example, the whole length of the agricultural value chain is being changed and more Ugandans in beneficiary communities have been brought forth into the money economy-a shift from traditional subsistence production.

The need to shake the  confrontational mentality: Whenever China addresses the world, it calls for cooperation and  peaceful co-existence. Two great examples of this are the principle of non-interference in affairs of sovereigns and the Belt and Road initiative which has a footprint almost in all continents of the world. Additionally, the proposal of building a community of humanity with a shared future is centered on building a global community that is beneficial to all of humanity and respect for the UN charter. Unfortunately, some of her peer competitors have assumed this security concept that “presence is deterrence” seemingly hell-bent on getting rid of China as a strategic objective before assisting with socio-economic transformation. At a time when China is calling on the rest of the developed world to cooperate in Africa, everyone else needs to shift their focus from addressing China’s growing influence on the continent towards taking a concerted efforts to  address the challenges Africa faces.

The voices of African heads of states at the IDA summit in Nairobi is the voice of an African continent that is conscious of what challenges the continent faces on its path to socio-economic transformation. In the same light, the props given to the People’s Republic of China is acknowledgement that China’s work on the continent is in sync with the aspirations of the continent.  Therefore, it is about time the rest of the developed world and all multilateral development agencies, if they are not duplicitous and truly mean to put prosperity above profiteering to stop viewing China as a rival on the African tuff but instead, cooperate with and where need be borrow a leaf from China’s approach if we are about building a resilient African continent.

George Musiime is a research fellow at the Sino-Uganda Research Centre.

 


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