AFRICA 'COULD BE WORST ECONOMIC CASUALTY': WORLD BANK. The World Bank has warned that Africa may become one of the worst economic casualties of the war against terrorism and the global economic slowdown, reports the Financial Times (p.8). Lack of investment, worsening trade terms and dwindling aid threaten hard-won political reforms on the continent, said Mamphela Ramphele, the World Bank's managing director for human development, this week.
"African democracies have had to go through so much to get where they are. If political leaders are not rewarded it becomes more difficult for them to take the next step," she said at a Southern Africa Financial Markets conference. The attacks on the US have further reduced growth, commodity prices and aid commitments, which spelled disaster for Africa, she noted. "Aid flows have halved over the past few years. We anticipate further cuts," she said.
Since the end of the cold war, African countries have lost much of their strategic value to the developed world and have also lost ground in attracting foreign direct investment, the story says. Over the past six years, the region's share of world flows fell from 1.25 percent to just under one percent, representing $40 billion.
The economic pressure is having an impact. Eleven African nations have slipped in the UN's human development ranking over the past 25 years. Of the world's 36 million HIV-positive people, 70 percent live in Africa, while sub-Saharan Africa has 46 percent of the world's share of people living on less than $1 a day. Per capita income has fallen across the region since 1975.
As the west's attention is drawn by Asia and the Middle East, reduced aid is likely to stall the re-construction of some of the poorest and most war-weary countries, including Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia. "There is no way in which countries that are so behind can make it on their own," Ramphele warned.
She urged the world's financial institutions to make a more lenient assessment of political stability in African markets in their investment strategies. Otherwise the continent would face a "bleak future," she said.
The World Bank has also said that Africa still produces too little food, depending more on food aid than it was 35 years ago, the Daily Trust (Nigeria) reports. The Bank noted in a paper that despite massive technical assistance and a growing share of international development aid between 1990 and 1996, sub-Saharan Africa received only 26 percent of all financial adi allocated to developing countries.
The news comes as Laurent Zecchini of Le Monde (France, p.IV) writes that there are two Africas. One is, understandably, constantly seeking debt relief from the international community. But that is development aid over the short term, says Zecchini. Over the long term, the political will of the rich countries will soften and the poor countries no longer encouraged to make progress on governance.
But another Africa is in the making, says Zecchini-that initiated by the handful of African leaders behind the New Initiative for Africa, who want to counter the mentality of aid-seeking in Africa and who believe it is up to Africans themselves to address the challenges they are faced with. Meeting with the EU recently, Africans and Europeans acknowledged differences of opinion on AIDS, food security, human rights, democracy and public affairs management. The Europeans would have spoken with even more credibility had they been able to present a less calamitous record of their development assistance, says Zecchini.
African leaders will gather in Nigeria on Tuesday for the formal launch of an ambitious economic plan, modeled on the US Marshall Plan for Europe, to revive the continent's ailing economies, Reuters reports on CNN.com. The launch of the New Africa Initiative will be spearheaded by its architects, South African President Thabo Mbeki, Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, Algeria's Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade. The gathering in Abuja will bring together more than a dozen African head of state, officials and diplomats said.
In other news from Africa, Ministers of Trade of Ghana and Uganda and representatives of Mauritania, Cote d'Ivoire, and Nigeria have agreed on the need for Africa to present a common front on issues during and after the WTO conference in Doha, the Accra Mail reports. The agreement was to ensure the articulation of African positions on various issues with a view to ensuring that decisions taken at the end of the conference reflected African concerns and positions, the story says.