Chicago Tribune - July 7, 2005
Clarence Page, cpage@tribune.com.

Madonna, Coldplay and other stars performed at Bob Geldof's Live 8 concert to urge the world's wealthiest nations meeting this week at the G-8 talks to double aid to Africa.

At the same time, Mr. Gadhafi, hosting a semiannual meeting of the African Union's 53 member governments in Libya, was urging his fellow African leaders to come together, solve their own problems and stop "begging" for outside aid.

Although few African leaders were willing to join Mr. Gadhafi's long-standing opposition to Western involvement in the continent, his comments express an extreme answer to a question many are asking: At a time when wealthy nations are remarkably united in their desire to help Africa, what's the best way to do it?

Most African leaders are willing to embrace Mr. Blair's aid proposals, at least in public, but not without some reservations. Well-intentioned as it is, the current push for the wealthy nations to "make poverty history" strikes many African ears as echoing the condescending missionaries and explorers who came from Europe in past centuries to "save" Africans from themselves.

Yet, much of Africa has desperate needs. More than 40 percent of Africans live on less than $1 a day; AIDS kills more than 2 million Africans a year. Many others are killed by malaria or by wars, which have broken out in 186 coups d'etat and 26 major conflicts in the wake of imperial pullouts a half-century ago.

Mr. Blair and other antipoverty campaigners are pushing for a doubling of aid to Africa. Mr. Bush has rejected Mr. Blair's target but offered to double America's 2004 level of Africa aid to $8.6 billion by 2010, which is more than any administration has done.

But, more important than aid is the approach the developed world takes in helping Africa in the long term.

For example, in April when I visited Dakar, Senegal, the bustling West African port city whose Hong Kong-like financial district surprised me, I found a rising generation of enterprising Africans who wanted trade, not aid, especially if they can get it under fair international rules and cleaner African governments.

And the new generation is not alone in looking at how capitalism, entrepreneurship and education have improved the fortunes of countries like China since the late 1970s, India since the early 1980s and Vietnam since the late 1980s.

"All of these were home-grown policy reforms, which allowed countries to get richer by making money, not by receiving it," an editorial in Britain's The Economist magazine rhapsodized on the eve of the G-8 summit.

And all three now trade with the U.S., providing cheaper goods and services and competing with American workers for jobs.

A new debate is emerging, not over whether to provide aid to fight global poverty, but what kind of aid is best. It resembles America's welfare-reform debate; some critics say that conventional aid actually hurts those it is intended to help.

As The Economist concludes, more aid may not "make poverty history," but it will do some good, at least in the short term. In the long term, however, the partnership between the developed and underdeveloped world will benefit best by following the old proverb: Give someone a fish, and you feed them for a day; teach them to fish, and you will feed them for a lifetime.

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