Is Aid Enough?

24 MB MP3

Chris’s Billboard

Africa is what they’re talking about this week: the rock stars, bankers, bleedings hearts and political chiefs of the big-8 lender nations, meeting on a golf course in Scotland. But listen carefully: they’re talking about several Africas: is it a continent or a crisis, and a cause? Is it victim of the West or of its own corrution? Will it ever be an opportunity, and a modern trading and investment partner? Is it another place, in short, or another planet? If it’s a basket case—a hospital ship adrift—aid is the urgent answer. But if your eye is on the human opportunity, and billions in old foreign-aid gone bad, the charity treatment could seem like more of the same wrong remedy. The banker nations are arguing about Tony Blair’s moral case for more aid. It’s Africans, oddly enough, who are making the case for trade, competence, and self-development. On Open Source: Africans of the rising generation are next, talking about Africa.

Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah

technologist and blogger, originally from Ghana

[in studio with Chris]

Professor Calestous Juma

From Kenya

recently wrote oped,We Need to Reinvent the African University

[in studio with Chris]

Joel Okao

Journalist, contributing to Panos’ AfricaVox, a group of African journalists writing from the G8 summit

[by phone from Edinburgh]