|
 In an article published in the Financial Times on 28 November, top economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute, urged world leaders meeting in Doha to undertake an overhaul of development financing. He criticised the current haphazard and inadequate system of development aid provision and called for greater accountability.
"The system is broken" writes Sachs, "though the conferees are unlikely to say so clearly." "Just as we need an overhaul of financial market regulation, we also need an overhaul of development finance, if we are to address problems of poverty, hunger, and climate change." Sachs continues: "There is no point of accountability. When aid is promised but not delivered, nobody really cares except the poor countries themselves. And more often than not, the poor get blamed for some malfeasance or another as the reason why aid has not flowed. Development ministers piously proclaim that they will honour their commitments, such as to double aid to Africa by 2010, even as their finance ministers are cutting their aid budgets. What is shocking is that the rich world has not been able to organise itself to increase aid to Africa by a measly $25bn per year (less than 10 cents per $100 of rich-world income), even as they have committed at least $2,500bn in the past month for financial-sector bail-outs". Sachs calls for development finance reform to "reconnect aid with measurable inputs and outputs" via targeted global funds and programmes, in which donor countries should pool their money, to fund public goods such as "primary education, food production (supplying seed and fertiliser to peasant farmers), clean water and sanitation, family planning and contraceptives (through the United Nations Population Fund), nutrition (through UNICEF and the World Food Programme), and ... infrastructure". He claims this would lead to greater transparency, so that the public in donor countries could see exactly how their money is being used. Source: |
