At TH!NK3's kick-off in Brussels Tuesday we heard a lot about aid, growth and millenium develooment goals and had a good deal to think about on my flight home.
This morning, doing some reasearch on speakers ad sources able to talk competently on aid and develpment I ran into this talk of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former finance minister of Nigeria (the most corrupted place on Earth in 2003, according to Transparency International), at one of the Ted conferences in Arusha, Tanzania. Okonjo-Iweala was Nigeria's first female Finance Minister, and attacked corruption to make the country more desirable for
foreign investment and job creation.
Okonjo-Iweala's data would need to be updated with figures aftre the last globla crisis, but she really makes her point on how Africa, or at least a good deal of its States, is at a very important turning point.
We know about the dreadful history of this magnificent continent, but if we really want to talk about development in Africa, we should look at the future and carefully record its positive signals.
Inflation and instability have come down in the last decade, argues Okonjo-Iweala, while confidence has increased, and this make a
Here's one take away figure: Africa is a place where 62% of the population is less than 24 years old while Europe and Japan have a negative demographic growth. The Continent literally has future running in its veins. But it still has to find the right combination of factors to grow out of mass poverty.
However, Okonjo-Iweala's most important point is on aid. "Africa shouldn't be worried of taking aid". US and UK could have never been built without the aid coming from Africa in the past centuries (both as resources and human power - Barack Obama was not even campaigning at the time!).
"The point- she rightly stresses - is not taking aid, but is how we use it!. Spain got 10 Billion Usd in aid to develop its service economy... The debate has to get more sophisticated than about getting aid or not!".
I guess this is exactly what I'll try to do in the next weeks on this blog.
Thank you for the post, I think one of suggestive ideas would be looking in the past and history to raise level of common awareness.
Yes, Aija, you’re absolutely right. One of the most interesting parts of Okonjo-Iweala discourse is how she stresses that African countries should go about development in the same way China and Europe have (infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline).
I guess there are a lot of lessons to be learned even for Southern Europe and Italy. This is one angle I will investigate as well in teh coming weeks.