This may be a PR piece by Caterpillar for their benefit… nonetheless it is also a good PR piece for those who espouse the Highway building as necessary infrastructure for Africa. Madagascar may be an island but it is the same story on the Continent of Africa.
Click here:
or cut and paste:
http://www.cat.com/cda/layout?m=8703&x=7&f=177263#/madagascar/
The call to construction is ringing out across Africa. Infrastructure is the new buzzword, pushed by leaders from South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki to Senegal’s Abdulaye Wade. It’s also a key topic at this week’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Cape Town, where political and business leaders from Africa will meet with heads of some of the world’s biggest companies to discuss, among other things, how Africa’s priority infrastructure projects can boost growth. According to a Gallup International survey commissioned by the WEF, Africans “focus more heavily on economic issues than do citizens in other parts of the world.” One in three Africans 
fear a failure of the economy compared to just one in five globally.
Despite a commodity boom that pushed growth to 5% in Africa last year, the continent’s leaders want better infrastructure to win more business. The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), an African initiative that aims to lure $64 billion in annual investment by tackling bad governance, ending conflicts and making the continent more business-friendly, has put improved infrastructure near the top of its to-do list. “There can be no meaningful development without trade,” reads NEPAD‘s infrastructure action plan. “And there can be no trade without adequate and reliable infrastructure.”
The need is as obvious as it is urgent. Africa’s roads and railway lines, ports and power grids are neither adequate nor reliable. Outside of southern Africa and Mauritius, much of the continent’s infrastructure is crumbling or nonexistent. Consider the Democratic Republic of Congo. You could fit France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain and Britain inside it, and the country is packed with timber and minerals, yet it has only a few thousand kilometers of paved road and 10,000 fixed telephone lines, and produces about the same amount of power as Albania. In other war-torn countries, such as Somalia and Sierra Leone, public buildings have been destroyed by years of fighting. Corruption and mismanagement have left public utilities in places such as Cameroon and Nigeria run down and inefficient.
The lack of infrastructure deters many companies from investing — and drives up costs for those that do. The World Bank estimates that to ship a container from Baltimore in the U.S. to Tanzania costs about $1,000, but to transport that same container from Tanzania to neighboring Burundi costs $10,000. “In many countries, companies have to generate their own power, dig for water, pay heavy distribution and telephone charges,” says David Hampshire, chairman of Diageo Africa, one of the continent’s biggest marketers of beer and spirits. “All these costs add up, and they end up being paid for by the consumer.”
To attract more investment, Africa has drawn up plans to spend billions over the next few decades. Zambia and Burkina Faso, both landlocked, want to build new rail lines through neighboring states to improve their connections to the sea. In East Africa, the Kenyan government and the rebel movement in southern Sudan plan to build a new railway track — at an estimated cost of more than $4 billion — from Sudan more than 1,000 km south to Rongai, Kenya, about 170 km northwest of Nairobi, where it will connect with the existing line to the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. That notoriously inefficient harbor, along with some half a dozen others around Africa’s coast, is set to undergo a massive expansion and modernization program over the next few years.
The next decade may also finally see the completion of the Trans-Saharan Highway from Algeria to Lagos, Nigeria. Equally bold is the West African Gas Pipeline, which will tap natural gas from the Nigerian oil fields in the country’s southeast and then run almost 700 km along the coast with links to power plants in Lagos, Benin, Togo and Ghana. The most ambitious plan is for a massive dam on the lower Congo River which would eventually produce more than twice the power generated by China’s controversial Three Gorges scheme — enough to sell electricity across the continent as well as export it to Asia and Europe. But that project is at least 20 years away.
Surprisingly, funds for new projects aren’t lacking. Africa’s richest countries are eager to build. South Africa’s government, for instance, is funding the new Coega port and industrial zone. “Private business is not too keen on putting money into infrastructure, so the government has said it will take the lead,” says Lionel Billings, manager for Coega’s enterprise development and investor interaction. Rich donor nations in the West often help finance schemes in poorer countries, as does the World Bank. A growing number of private and foreign government-backed infrastructure funds based in Europe and the U.S., such as AIG African Infrastructure Fund and New Africa Infrastructure Fund, are also supplying capital.
The problem is confidence. Financiers, whether private or public, need projects that they can rely on. “We’ve got liquidity we’re embarrassed about,” says Keith Palmer, chairman of the London-based Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund and vice chair of the U.K. investment bank NM Rothschild & Sons Ltd. “But there’s a lack of well-structured, creditworthy opportunities.” Business leaders cite numerous hurdles to investment: corruption, political instability and African governments’ lack of capacity to run huge projects and reluctance to hand over control of projects to the private sector. Richard Laing, chief executive of the Commonwealth Development Corporation, Britain’s agency for investment in the developing world, says the problem is dealing with African governments which have “an unwillingness to let go and a lot of distrust.”
There’s also a catch-22: Africa needs investment and improved infrastructure to develop, but finds it hard to attract the capital such projects need without more development. Thormählen Schweisstechnik, a German company that last year won the right to construct and operate for 25 years the planned railway line from Southern Sudan to the Kenyan coast, is already running into problems with the Kenyan government. Klaus Thormählen, head of the company, says, somewhat euphemistically, “the decision-making process [does not] maintain its dynamics during the times of our absence.” A spokesman in the Kenyan President’s office says that Kenya backs the scheme and is working with the German company to make sure the line is built.
Back at Coega port, a huge crane lifts another concrete block into position. The dock area, which was constructed behind a dam wall, has now been flooded, and is awaiting its first ship. “One of the things that will make it meaningful for South Africans is to see the first businesses set up here,” says Qinga-Vika. “It may just be concrete and steel and new roads, but this is a symbol of hope that we’re doing something to turn this city and continent around.”
For information on the Lagos (Nigeria) to Mombasa (Kenya) highway with Map from Wikipedia please go to the following web site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagos-Mombasa_Highway
or click below:
To judge how far aid has helped Africa along the road to prosperity, just look down at the pavement _ or the lack of it.
The most important highway in East Africa starts at the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. Tens of thousands of trucks every year carry food, fuel and other goods to 100 million people in east and central Africa up a bone-jarring two-lane road.
Despite millions of aid dollars spent on roads, the wear and tear is so bad that journeys take weeks. And the cost makes it cheaper to have a container of corn shipped from Iowa than to truck it 500 miles (800 kilometers) to western Kenya.
In the 50 years since the first African countries won independence, the world has spent US$568 billion (euro394 billion) on Africa. Yet Africans are poorer now than a quarter century ago, and much of the money has ended up on the road to nowhere. This dismal record is sparking a vigorous debate on how best to help the world’s poorest continent, and to what degree aid is the answer.
A growing chorus of Africans is saying what they need is not handouts, but investment so they can rebuild on their own.
“Africans….are tired. They are tired of being the subject of everybody’s charity and care. And what is happening in many African countries now is the realization that nobody can do it but us,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a World Bank managing director and former finance minister of Nigeria, at a talk on a changing Africa. “We can invite partners who support us, but we have to start.”
___
Roads are the lifeblood of an economy, the delivery system for agriculture, mining, tourism and other mainstays of African industry. But roads in Africa are few and bad. When foreign companies calculate the price of doing business on the continent, they look at figures like the cost of transportation and decide to go somewhere else.
“No one would ever have 100 million people in the rich world along a broken-down, two-lane, undivided road as we do here,” said leading economist Jeffrey Sachs about Nairobi. “If the donors were thinking about what would really provide development, it’s a proper, divided highway on which truck traffic could go.”
Truth is, they did think of it _ and almost built it _ 40 years ago. But today, the east-west Trans-African Highway exists only on maps. On the ground, it turns into a muddy footpath in the jungles of eastern Congo.
The story of the highway shows why aid to Africa has largely failed in the past, and what can be learned for the future.
Back in 1969, the Japanese government proposed extending the Mombasa Highway to Lagos, Nigeria on the Atlantic Ocean. The four-lane, 4,400-mile (7,080-kilometer) paved highway would be slightly longer than Interstate 90 running from Boston to Seattle across the United States. It was to bring modern trade to six African countries.
By 1971, the deal had the support of the six countries, nine other rich countries and six international aid agencies. They hoped to have at least two lanes of all-weather road open by 1978.
It did not take long for problems to emerge. Dictator Idi Amin took control of Uganda and threatened neighboring Kenya, which then closed the highway.
The fight reflected a constant plague for foreign aid to Africa _ corrupt dictators, and donors who gave them money to protect political and economic interests. Nowhere was this exchange clearer than in Zaire, now known as Congo.
Zaire needed to build roads from scratch. But the Central African country was ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most brutal dictators in African history.
Mobutu took power during the Cold War, at a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were scrambling for influence in Africa. In the mid-1970s, he was a funnel for arms flowing to anti-communist rebels.
And so billions of dollars poured into Zaire to keep him happy, and to maintain the flow of Zairean gold, diamonds and copper to the West. Western nations largely looked the other way as the aid money disappeared into his offshore bank accounts and into the pockets of dozens of corrupt leaders.
Mobutu stopped plans for the highway in 1974, after stealing the money Belgium gave him for initial surveys. In a well-known African joke that reflects the thinking of the time, a young African dictator calls Mobutu for advice after coming under rebel attack.
“Did they come by sea?” Mobutu asks.
“No,” the younger ruler would reply.
“Did they come by air?” Mobutu asks.
“No, they came by road,” the protege answers.
“Tsk tsk, my son, I always told you,” Mobutu says. “Never build roads.”
___
Despite Mobutu in Zaire, the highway was in good condition in Kenya. In the 1970s, the East African country’s economy was booming, with trucks filled with valuable coffee and tea running downhill from mile-high (1.6-kilometer-high) Nairobi and across breathtaking African savanna to the port of Mombasa.
But roads do not last forever. The average African highway is designed to last 15-20 years, if properly maintained, says Andrew Gitonga, the Kenya roads project officer for the European Union. Since 1983, the European Union has spent US$200 million (euro139 million) to repair Kenya’s section of the highway and has about US$120 million (euro83.2 million) more of road projects planned this year.
Gitonga says the road needs to be completely rebuilt.
“There has been no standard maintenance program for 15 years, so the roads are falling into disrepair until they collapse,” he says. “Some government contracts in the past were given in an untransparent manner to unqualified contractors without clear standards.”
The transition between good road work and bad is painfully obvious when you hit a pothole at 50 mph. A close examination of the hole will show that whoever built it skimped on the thickness of the rock bed and the asphalt surfacing, pocketing a little extra profit.
Almost every day road workers can be seen patching the holes. One man sprays in some tar, a second shovels in a little asphalt and a third goes over it twice with a compactor. Within five minutes the lane is open, with hundreds of cars every hour driving over a repair that will probably last less than six months, or until the seasonal rains wash it away.
The same neglect for maintenance has led to the slow deterioration of thousands of donor-funded projects over the years.
Just off the Mombasa highway in Nairobi, the International Committee of the Red Cross maintains its distribution hub for eastern Africa. Trucks loaded with food and supplies set off to deliver aid to some of the world’s most desperate people.
The biggest obstacle: The roads.
“The roads are in a desolate state and they are not getting any better,” says Bent Korsgaard, logistics director for the Kenya office.
A University of Minnesota study determined that big trucks cost about 43.4 cents a mile (1.6 kilometers) to operate on normal roads. In Africa, the cost for Red Cross trucks is US$2.88 (euro2) a mile (1.6 kilometers).
A truck that follows the Trans-African Highway for the 1,500 mile (2,400-kilometer), 21-day roundtrip to Butembo, Congo requires five days in the workshop when it gets back. It’s cheaper to hire a Russian cargo plane than to drive a truck to some cities within 620 miles (1,000 kilometers).
That doesn’t even count the bribes truckers have to pay on African roads. A recent survey in West Africa found they range from about US$3.33 (euro2.3) per 60 miles (97 kilometers) in Togo to US$25 (euro17) in Mali.
___
Roads are hardly the only aid fiascos. Kenya alone is littered with dozens of half-baked, half-built projects funded by wealthy countries, monuments to good intentions gone awry.
Often donors did not understand Africa or talk to Africans. The Norwegian government built a fish processing plant on Lake Turkana in the 1970s to provide jobs for nomadic cattle herders _ soon doomed in part because the local community had no fishing culture.
In a self-assessment in 1987, the World Bank found 106 out of 189 African development projects audited _ almost 60 percent _ had serious shortcomings or were complete failures. African agriculture projects failed 75 percent of the time.
The World Bank did better when it worked more closely with communities and better monitored projects. But a recent report on aid from the World Bank’s private arm, the International Finance Corporation, found only half of its Africa projects succeed.
Aid is also hampered because it is often determined not just by what poor countries need but by what rich countries want to give to boost their own economies.
Much so-called foreign aid never leaves the country that promised it, because donor governments spend it to buy domestically-produced products or hire its own citizens as consultants. The World Bank estimates that throughout the 1980s, more than half of all aid was tied to what donor countries wanted to export, often at higher prices than could be found on the market. This practice reduced the value of aid by anywhere from 11 to 30 percent.
Under the Buy American Act, the U.S. Agency for International Development must spend aid money to buy products and services from U.S. suppliers whenever possible, and then deliver them aboard expensive U.S.-flagged ships or planes.
“Foreign assistance is far from charity,” J. Brian Atwood, the USAID director under former President Bill Clinton, told Congress in 1995. “It is an investment in American jobs, American business.”
Other rich nations do the same. Japan, one of the largest donors to Africa, provides a lot of aid in the form of four-wheel-drive vehicles _ despite the roads.
Sachs, the Columbia University professor, argues past aid failed because not enough was invested at every level, in every sector. In 2004, Sachs and the United Nations started the Millennium Project experiment to supply 12 African villages with all they need, all at once, and see if they can be self-sufficient in five years.
“The speed of results is astounding and the point is that if the resources are there, the rate of improvement is wonderful,” Sachs says. “I believe that we’re at the cusp of that now.”
Sachs’ nemesis, economist William Easterly of New York University, retorts that Sachs’ results are on a very small scale. He says only a free market can lift a nation out of poverty, and wants to see far more limited aid for specific programs with good track records, such as health care.
Easterly argues that aid bureaucracies are now rewarded for giving money that never reaches those who need it.
“It’s just not possible for outsiders with their experts to create economic development and prosperity in another country,” he says. “We should say: `There are a lot of problems and as rich outsiders we can’t fix everything, but where can we do the most good for the most people?”’
The stakes are high. The outcome will decide if _ and how _ the world spends another US$568 (euro394) billion on Africa.
___
The dream of a world-class road network for Africa is still alive, at least on paper. The African Union has a plan to build it, but it would take tens of billions of dollars that could come only from rich countries.
The east-west Trans-African Highway is still missing about 1,826 miles (2,939 kilometers). But West African states are building a regional network that will run from landlocked Chad to the Western port of Dakar in Senegal, and from Mauritania to Nigeria. Kenya is also building a road to neighboring Ethiopia.
Aid to Africa is going up again to about US$37 (euro26) per capita, from a low of US$24 in 1999. But this time the world has learned something. Aid to countries with more democratic systems has tripled at the expense of those whose leaders have unchecked power, according to the World Bank.
These days, when a new road is under construction in Kenya, white cars with European Union flags on the doors visit every day to make sure every inch of the highway is built to specification.
And a maintenance contract comes with it.
The most important highway in East Africa starts at the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. Tens of thousands of trucks every year carry food, fuel and other goods to 100 million people in east and central Africa up a bone-jarring two-lane road.
Despite millions of aid dollars spent on roads, the wear and tear is so bad that journeys take weeks. And the cost makes it cheaper to have a container of corn shipped from Iowa than to truck it 500 miles to western Kenya.
————————————————–
“Africans do not want to be viewed as a charity case,” adds Okonjo-Iweala, a World Bank managing director. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of Africans are people who are getting on with their own lives. All they are asking for is….a set of tools.”
Roads are the lifeblood of an economy, the delivery system for agriculture, mining, tourism and other mainstays of African industry. But roads in Africa are few and bad. When foreign companies calculate the price of doing business on the continent, they look at figures like the cost of transportation and decide to go somewhere else.
“No one would ever have 100 million people in the rich world along a broken-down, two-lane, undivided road as we do here,” said leading economist Jeffrey Sachs about Nairobi. “If the donors were thinking about what would really provide development, it’s a proper, divided highway on which truck traffic could go.”
Truth is, they did think of it and almost built it 40 years ago. But today, the east-west Trans-African Highway exists only on maps. On the ground, it turns into a muddy footpath in the jungles of eastern Congo.
In conversations with some colleagues and a few so-called friends, I’ve often been the subject of strong criticism for my view that aid money would be better spent on infrastructure and institutions that facilitated the free flow of business and international trade as opposed to food shipments. It’s hard for non-supply chain/logistics people to understand that if you don’t have the necessary infrastructure in place it doesn’t matter how much you throw at the system, it simply isn’t going to move well and all your money is going to be eaten up in logistics costs. It’s no different than looking at international trade – countries with poor infrastructure make trade difficult and expensive. It’s no different with aid logistics. And I think this article is accurate in stating that what most Africans want is not a handout, but simply the means to stand on their own two feet and support themselves. This guy gets it. Although to get Africa’s infrastructure off the ground will take more than micro-credits the concept is still there.
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Published on Taipei Times Trans-African Highway mirrors failure of Africa aid Africans are poorer now than a quarter century ago, despite the US$568 billion in aid poured into the continent in the past 50 years. Many say what is needed is investment, not more aid By Chris Tomlinson
To judge how far aid has helped Africa along the road to prosperity, just look down at the pavement — or the lack of it. The most important highway in East Africa starts at the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. Tens of thousands of trucks every year carry food, fuel and other goods to 100 million people in east and central Africa up a bone-jarring two-lane road. Despite millions of aid dollars spent on roads, the wear and tear is so bad that journeys take weeks. And the cost makes it cheaper to have a container of corn shipped from Iowa than to truck it 800km to western Kenya. In the 50 years since the first African countries won independence, the world has spent US$568 billion on Africa. Yet Africans are poorer now than a quarter century ago, and much of the money has ended up on the road to nowhere. This dismal record is sparking a vigorous debate on how best to help the world’s poorest continent, and to what degree aid is the answer. A growing chorus of Africans is saying what they need is not handouts, but investment so they can rebuild on their own. “Africans … are tired. They are tired of being the subject of everybody’s charity and care. And what is happening in many African countries now is the realization that nobody can do it but us,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a World Bank managing director and former finance minister of Nigeria, at a talk on a changing Africa. “We can invite partners who support us, but we have to start.” LIFEBLOOD Roads are the lifeblood of an economy, the delivery system for agriculture, mining, tourism and other mainstays of African industry. But roads in Africa are few and bad. When foreign companies calculate the price of doing business on the continent, they look at figures like the cost of transportation and decide to go somewhere else. “No one would ever have 100 million people in the rich world along a broken-down, two-lane, undivided road as we do here,” said leading economist Jeffrey Sachs about Nairobi. “If the donors were thinking about what would really provide development, it’s a proper, divided highway on which truck traffic could go.” Truth is, they did think of it — and almost built it — 40 years ago. But today, the east-west Trans-African Highway exists only on maps. On the ground, it turns into a muddy footpath in the jungles of eastern Congo. The story of the highway shows why aid to Africa has largely failed in the past, and what can be learned for the future. Back in 1969, the Japanese government proposed extending the Mombasa Highway to Lagos, Nigeria on the Atlantic Ocean. The four-lane, 7,080km paved highway would be slightly longer than Interstate 90 running from Boston to Seattle across the US. It was to bring modern trade to six African countries. By 1971, the deal had the support of the six countries, nine other rich countries and six international aid agencies. They hoped to have at least two lanes of all-weather road open by 1978. It did not take long for problems to emerge. Dictator Idi Amin took control of Uganda and threatened neighboring Kenya, which then closed the highway. MOBUTU The fight reflected a constant plague for foreign aid to Africa — corrupt dictators, and donors who gave them money to protect political and economic interests. Nowhere was this exchange clearer than in Zaire, now known as Congo. Zaire needed to build roads from scratch. But the Central African country was ruled by Mobutu Sese Seko, one of the most brutal dictators in African history. Mobutu took power during the Cold War, at a time when the US and the Soviet Union were scrambling for influence in Africa. In the mid-1970s, he was a funnel for arms flowing to anti-communist rebels. And so billions of dollars poured into Zaire to keep him happy, and to maintain the flow of Zairean gold, diamonds and copper to the West. Western nations largely looked the other way as the aid money disappeared into his offshore bank accounts and into the pockets of dozens of corrupt leaders. Mobutu stopped plans for the highway in 1974, after stealing the money Belgium gave him for initial surveys. In a well-known African joke that reflects the thinking of the time, a young African dictator calls Mobutu for advice after coming under rebel attack. “Did they come by sea?” Mobutu asks. “No,” the younger ruler would reply. “Did they come by air?” Mobutu asks. “No, they came by road,” the protege answers. “Tsk tsk, my son, I always told you,” Mobutu says. “Never build roads.” REPAIRS, REBUILDING Despite Mobutu in Zaire, the highway was in good condition in Kenya. In the 1970s, the East African country’s economy was booming, with trucks filled with valuable coffee and tea running downhill from 1.6km-high Nairobi and across breathtaking African savanna to the port of Mombasa. But roads do not last forever. The average African highway is designed to last 15 to 20 years, if properly maintained, says Andrew Gitonga, the Kenya roads project officer for the EU. Since 1983, the EU has spent US$200 million to repair Kenya’s section of the highway and has about US$120 million more of road projects planned this year. Gitonga said the road needs to be completely rebuilt. “There has been no standard maintenance program for 15 years, so the roads are falling into disrepair until they collapse,” he said. “Some government contracts in the past were given in an untransparent manner to unqualified contractors without clear standards.” The transition between good road work and bad is painfully obvious when you hit a pothole at 80.5kph. A close examination of the hole will show that whoever built it skimped on the thickness of the rock bed and the asphalt surfacing, pocketing a little extra profit. Almost every day road workers can be seen patching the holes. One man sprays in some tar, a second shovels in a little asphalt and a third goes over it twice with a compactor. Within five minutes the lane is open, with hundreds of cars every hour driving over a repair that will probably last less than six months, or until the seasonal rains wash it away. MISGUIDED DONORS The same neglect for maintenance has led to the slow deterioration of thousands of donor-funded projects over the years. Just off the Mombasa highway in Nairobi, the International Committee of the Red Cross maintains its distribution hub for eastern Africa. Trucks loaded with food and supplies set off to deliver aid to some of the world’s most desperate people. The biggest obstacle: The roads. “The roads are in a desolate state and they are not getting any better,” says Bent Korsgaard, logistics director for the Kenya office. A University of Minnesota study determined that big trucks cost about US$0.434 per 1.6km to operate on normal roads. In Africa, the cost for Red Cross trucks is US$2.88 per 1.6km. A truck that follows the Trans-African Highway for the 2,400km, 21-day roundtrip to Butembo, Congo requires five days in the workshop when it gets back. It’s cheaper to hire a Russian cargo plane than to drive a truck to some cities within 1,000km. That doesn’t even count the bribes truckers have to pay on African roads. A recent survey in West Africa found they range from about US$3.33 per 97km in Togo to US$25 in Mali. Roads are hardly the only aid fiascos. Kenya alone is littered with dozens of half-baked, half-built projects funded by wealthy countries, monuments to good intentions gone awry. GOOD INTENTIONS Often donors did not understand Africa or talk to Africans. The Norwegian government built a fish processing plant on Lake Turkana in the 1970s to provide jobs for nomadic cattle herders — soon doomed in part because the local community had no fishing culture. In a self-assessment in 1987, the World Bank found 106 out of 189 African development projects audited — almost 60 percent — had serious shortcomings or were complete failures. African agriculture projects failed 75 percent of the time. The World Bank did better when it worked more closely with communities and better monitored projects. But a recent report on aid from the World Bank’s private arm, the International Finance Corp, found only half of its Africa projects succeed. Aid is also hampered because it is often determined not just by what poor countries need but by what rich countries want to give to boost their own economies. Much so-called foreign aid never leaves the country that promised it, because donor governments spend it to buy domestically-produced products or hire its own citizens as consultants. The World Bank estimates that throughout the 1980s, more than half of all aid was tied to what donor countries wanted to export, often at higher prices than could be found on the market. This practice reduced the value of aid by anywhere from 11 to 30 percent. Under the Buy American Act, the US Agency for International Development must spend aid money to buy products and services from US suppliers whenever possible, and then deliver them aboard expensive US-flagged ships or planes. “Foreign assistance is far from charity,” J. Brian Atwood, the USAID director under former President Bill Clinton, told Congress in 1995. “It is an investment in American jobs, American business.” Other rich nations do the same. Japan, one of the largest donors to Africa, provides a lot of aid in the form of four-wheel-drive vehicles — despite the roads. MILLENNIUM PROJECT Sachs argues past aid failed because not enough was invested at every level, in every sector. In 2004, Sachs and the UN started the Millennium Project experiment to supply 12 African villages with all they need, all at once, and see if they can be self-sufficient in five years. “The speed of results is astounding and the point is that if the resources are there, the rate of improvement is wonderful,” Sachs says. “I believe that we’re at the cusp of that now.” Sachs’ nemesis, economist William Easterly of New York University, retorts that Sachs’ results are on a very small scale. He says only a free market can lift a nation out of poverty, and wants to see far more limited aid for specific programs with good track records, such as health care. Easterly argues that aid bureaucracies are now rewarded for giving money that never reaches those who need it. “It’s just not possible for outsiders with their experts to create economic development and prosperity in another country,” he said. “We should say: `There are a lot of problems and as rich outsiders we can’t fix everything, but where can we do the most good for the most people?”‘ The stakes are high. The outcome will decide if — and how — the world spends another US$568 billion on Africa. DREAM STILL ALIVE The dream of a world-class road network for Africa is still alive — at least on paper. The African Union has a plan to build it, but it would take tens of billions of dollars that could come only from rich countries. The east-west Trans-African Highway is still missing about 2,939km. But West African states are building a regional network that will run from landlocked Chad to the Western port of Dakar in Senegal, and from Mauritania to Nigeria. Kenya is also building a road to neighboring Ethiopia. Aid to Africa is going up again to about US$37per capita, from a low of US$24 in 1999. But this time the world has learned something. Aid to countries with more democratic systems has tripled at the expense of those whose leaders have unchecked power, according to the World Bank. These days, when a new road is under construction in Kenya, white cars with EU flags on the doors visit every day to make sure every inch of the highway is built to specification. And a maintenance contract comes with it. |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-African_Highway_network
Capetown to Nairobi
Nairobi to Lagos
Lagos to Dakar
Dakar to Kano
Kano to Algiers
Algiers to the 21st century.
Would you try to off-road?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Map_of_Trans-African_Highways.PNG
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Andrew Maykuth, The Inquirer’s Johannesburg bureau chief, and photographer Michael Wirtz journeyed through East Africa, accompanying a food aid truck into rebel-held territory in Sudan. Their odyssey through Kenya and Uganda into Sudan is chronicled here in articles, photos, and multimedia presentations.
http://www213.pair.com/maykuth/odyssey/pages/start.html
Andrew Maykuth, The Inquirer’s Johannesburg bureau chief, and photographer Michael Wirtz journeyed through East Africa, accompanying a food aid truck into rebel-held territory in Sudan. Their odyssey through Kenya and Uganda into Sudan is chronicled here in articles, photos, and multimedia presentations.
Trans African Highway 1 on Flicker Photo Sharing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/11707386@N06/2201934782/
Start the year off right. Easy ways to stay in shape in the new year.
The below are a reason why a “TRANS-AFRICAN HIGHWAY” is so difficult to realize. How many committees are necessary?? Would it not be better to handle ALL of these from the AU (African Union)???
Craig Eisele's Global Hydrogen Project 