'Millions will die in Africa'

2006-01-10 10:43

Chris Tomlinson

Nairobi - Promises of aid to Africa must be kept in 2006 or millions of people would die needlessly, said the top United Nations adviser on poverty on Monday, while insisting that every penny must be accounted for to ensure it was used properly.

Jeffrey Sachs, who was director of the Millennium Project and special adviser to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, called 2005 the year of promises, after the leaders of the world's wealthiest countries promised to double aid to Africa.

Sachs, director of The Earth Institute at Columbia University, said: "2006 has to be the year of real action on the ground.

Life and death issue

"Significant, targeted investments aimed at raising food production in Africa, at addressing urgent health needs, at making investments in water management would allow an escape from what is now a seemingly endless cycle of disaster."

But donors will condemn millions to death if they again fail to deliver on their aid pledges, he said.

He said: "This missing aid, which was promised by donors for so long, but not yet delivered, is really a life and death issue, nothing less than that."

Sachs cited a project he had been directing in Kenya called the Millennium Village Project, as an example of how aid could be successful, if a comprehensive and accountable approach was taken.

He said food production had risen more than 300% and the village was working its way out of absolute poverty.

Disease, poverty, hunger

His stop in Kenya was part of a six-country African tour promoting the Millennium Village approach with the goal of instituting it elsewhere.

Sachs said: "If we take a proper, hard-headed and businesslike approach to the issues of disease, poverty and hunger, there are practical solutions.

"They don't involve blank cheques coming from donor countries to poor countries, they don't involve the other side haranguing poor countries about their poverty."

Sachs said successful development came from "scientifically-based investments".

Critics had said that aid to Africa had been largely wasted through widespread corruption and that there was no reason to believe new aid would not also be misused.

Sachs argued that rich countries had themselves misspent aid money and had never lived up to their promise, made in 1970, to spend 0.7% of their gross national products to help poor countries.

He said: "If they follow through on that, there is enough money to overcome the hunger deficit; to fight malaria, Aids, tuberculosis and other killer diseases; to build basic infrastructure and to enable impoverished countries to start climbing the ladder of development."

Sachs said most Americans vastly underestimate how much the United States government spent on aid to poor countries.

He said: "The US, for all of Africa, is spending something like $4bn this year, and a lot of that is on American consultants."

- AP