Saving Africa

The International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and the vast bureaucracy of the United Nations have cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars. A New Yorker article points out, "Poor countries have been receiving at least some foreign aid for thirty or forty years—a total of more than a trillion dollars, in one estimate".
Yet Africa still has dictators, insurmountable poverty, war upon war, and no hope of improvement.
The situation is so bad the even the Bush administration was able to make improvements in the fight against malaria. If Bush can make a difference, imagine what a concerted effort could achieve.
Shared investments such as the IMF, UN, and World Bank have NOT worked.
So let's have each nation pick a cause or a nation and say to the rest of the world, "we are going to work with this specific country and improve the roads, schools, universities, water supply, job skills, agricultural coops, and civil service system."
Each first world nation will have a quota of African nations to support. This is not the re-invention of colonialism. This is the application of accountability through visibility to achieve results. The existing agencies that pool money from industrial nations will be REPLACED with the one-on-one approach. There will be plenty of opportunities for corruption and inefficiency. If Sweden is matched with Zambia, we will no doubt see more volvos and saabs in the capital and a claim from Stockholm that millions have been invested to improve transportation in xxx. But this is not about the number of dollars spent.

How does accountability improve with individual nation assignments?
The people of the sponsoring nation, once they know their country is responsible on the world stage for another country, will ask more questions of their government.
The people will want to do better than the countries with whom they compare their own.
A practice that Denmark makes work in Zambia will lead to questions within Sweden about why continue failed practices in Ghana.



Accountability and visibility mean that we will establish a baseline measurement of the number of schools, number of students, literacy rate, gross national product, number of middle class families. the number of volvos Zambian army colonels drive on independence day parades doesn't matter. The world will receive an annual report on the increase in high school graduates, new exports, Zambian students in Swedish universities.

Country matches must recognize potential biases that some first world nations may have. The New Yorker article points out, "Sweden and other Scandinavian countries supported Julius Nyerere’s socialist regime in Tanzania, which almost destroyed the agricultural sector by dragooning scattered bushmen into collective farms."

More to come and your thoughts invited to explore the approach.