WEST AFRICA: Mr Tony Blair yesterday called for sweeping changes to the way the West delivers aid to Africa to prevent a repetition of the days when the main beneficiaries were dictators and the elites.
Addressing the Ghanaian parliament on the second day of his visit to West Africa, he said that while aid was now better targeted and monitored than a decade ago it was still not effective enough.
The belief within Downing Street is that the focus should be less on aid and more on offering African countries better trade agreements and help to resolve the conflicts that drain so much of African resources.
"One of the reasons many people in the West are cynical about aid and development is because a lot of money had been misused for the elites and corrupt leaders," Mr Blair said. Aid should be used not as a "hand-out but a hand-up".
The Prime Minister criticised other Western countries that continue to tie aid to commercial contracts.
"Too much of global aid is still used to sweeten commercial contracts or to purchase goods from donor countries."
Mr Blair won applause from the parliamentarians when he reiterated his call for the West to open up its markets to African countries. He said that some EU tariffs on African goods were as high as 300 per cent.
On Wednesday, addressing Nigerian parliamentarians at the national assembly in the federal capital, Abuja, Mr Blair said "When an African child dies every three seconds, the developed world has a clear duty to act. No responsible world leader can turn his back on Africa." He said involvement in Africa was not just a matter of doing the right thing but in the West's self-interest.
He threw his weight for the first time behind a proposal to open up Western markets to Africa. He will press other members of the Group of Eight, the leading industrialised nations, to support the plan when they meet in Canada in June.
African leaders have long called for an end to the quotas and other obstacles placed in the way of African goods. Under the plan envisaged by Mr Blair, African goods would be able to enter European, US and Japanese markets duty-free.
The British government view is that an increase in trade will be much more beneficial for Africa than huge amounts of new aid.
On peacekeeping, he supported attempts to reform the United Nations peacekeeping effort, which had a shambolic record on the continent throughout most of the 1990s. He promised help from the West for African regional peacekeeping forces: these would be mainly in the form of training and logistics. British forces were already helping in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Nigeria as well as in southern Africa.