We hear about billions here, billions there, but the masses are not feeling these billions. This won't change anything unless the masses can know where the money is going.
- Willliams Sassou, Lagos, Nigeria, quoted in “Africa welcomes G8 aid, questions
implementation,” by Andrew Quinn, Reuters, Fri Jul 8, 2005. 

The results of the G8 summit meeting have been buried beneath the headlines about the terrorist attacks in London.  Despite the secondary news coverage, the meeting in Gleneagles, Scotland, that concluded on July 8 may have a huge, positive impact on reducing poverty in Africa.  Then again, it may not.  

The G8 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States – agreed to:

· Double the amount of aid to Africa to $50 billion per year by 2010;

· Provide near-universal access to AIDS treatment by 2010 and increase other health-related assistance;

· End farm export subsidies that undercut prices received by African farmers; and

· Strengthen peacekeeping forces in Africa. 

The G8 countries had already agreed prior to the Summit to forgive $45 billion of debt owed by 18 poor nations, 14 of which are in Africa. 

So, what’s the potential downside? 

In a word: delivery.  Will the G8 countries deliver on their promises?  If so, when and how?  And will African leaders deliver to their citizens when and if the G8 countries come through? 

It was encouraging to see the Live8 concerts and all of the accompanying publicity leading up to the G8 summit.  For the first time ever, an international campaign with tens of millions of participants coalesced around the theme articulated by Nelson Mandela: “Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity, it is an act of justice." 

But can this theme of Live8 stay alive and active over the coming months and years?  Can this amorphous popular movement based on a belief that people should have the right to live free of extreme poverty continue to play a role in holding the leaders of the developed world to their promises? 

We’ll see. 

And, in terms of delivery by African leaders, there are some encouraging signs in a number of countries.  For one thing, debt relief and many aid programs are increasingly targeted at democratic governments that are tackling problems of corruption and bureaucratic waste.  In many aid programs, governments and non-governmental organizations that run assistance programs are being held more and more accountable for the results they achieve.  (See, for example, the process used to select and monitor projects by the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, www.theglobalfund.org/en.) 

For another thing, citizens in many African countries have become fed up with government corruption and incompetence and are providing pressure from below to hold their leaders accountable.  (I have witnessed this personally on visits to Zambia, Ghana, and Mozambique during the past five years.) 

There remain, however, a number of questions about how to reduce poverty and disease among villagers and poor urban residents in an effective and sustainable manner.  I’ll come back to this issue at the end of the article.  But first, I want to provide a little background information for the G8 and Live8 events.     

· Over a billion people – one-sixth of the world’s population – live in extreme poverty, lacking the basic needs for survival?

· Over 8 million people die every year from preventable and treatable diseases?

· Almost all of these lives could be saved if developed countries provided about $70 per person per year for prevention and treatment?

· The U.S. provides less development assistance than any other developed country on a per capita basis? 

Jeffrey Sachs provides a detailed – and hopeful -- analysis of these issues in The End of Poverty, published in March of this year.  About 1.1 billion people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America live in extreme poverty.  They lack clean water, adequate food, minimal health care, and other basic necessities of life.  The main thesis of Sachs’ book is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

I approached the book with a little trepidation.  Sachs is a Harvard-trained macroeconomist who received a great deal of international attention during the fall of the Soviet empire.  He was accused of being a cold-turkey warrior because of his advocacy for a rapid transition from a command economy to a market economy in Poland, Russia, and other countries.  One consequence of such an abrupt transformation was a rise in the cost of basic commodities and the hardships this caused for poor people.  

I was pleased to find a much less market-driven version of Sachs in The End of Poverty.  In the book, Sachs makes a persuasive case that there are not market solutions to extreme poverty.  In his analysis, developed countries need to donate funds to developing countries and reduce their indebtedness.  He argues that a doubling of financial assistance from developed countries could eliminate extreme poverty by 2025. (Sound familiar?  That’s the increase just approved for Africa at the G8 summit.) 

Sachs also makes it clear that these funds need to be effectively targeted and carefully used, if this ambitious goal is to be realized.  He identifies the primary causes of eight million preventable deaths each year as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis.  He makes a convincing case that the large majority of these deaths could be avoided through low-cost education programs; preventive health care measures -- such as distribution of condoms, mosquito nets and insecticides; and the aggressive treatment of diseases with state-of-the-art drugs – for example, antiretroviral drugs for HIV/AIDS and the use of multiple drugs for resistant strains of TB. 

Overall, I think Sachs did an excellent job in The End of Poverty in his marshalling of information, his analysis, his recommendations and, most important of all for me, his conviction that ending extreme poverty should be a top priority for all of us and that this goal is achievable in our lifetimes. 

I do have two criticisms of the book.  The first is that it was not written for a popular audience and, thus, didn’t get the attention it deserved.  The second is that the book focuses on macroeconomic issues related to alleviating poverty, despite the fact that problems of poverty ultimately need to be solved on the ground, at the micro-level.   

Here’s a recommendation related to the first criticism.  The Live8 concerts have shown us that people care about world poverty and that the more they know, the more they care – and the more they can influence world leaders.  Sachs -- and the Earth Institute at Columbia University that he heads – should put together a more readable version of the End of Poverty that is geared to a popular audience.  The new version would almost certainly make the New York Times best seller list and help a broad array of people to understand how to solve the problems of extreme poverty.  A companion documentary film aimed at the general public would also be a great way to educate and mobilize people around this issue. 

The second criticism is a bit trickier to address.  The issue boils down to: How do we take multi-billion dollar international aid programs and make them useful to specific people in a single village or poor urban neighborhood?  It’s a long way from the G8 summit to a small village in Burkina Faso.  

Historically, aid programs have foundered on this question for a variety of reasons having to do with centralized and cumbersome decision-making, incompetence, inadequate accountability, greed, and corruption. 

But there is an answer to this question and there are thousands of examples of its successful implementation in both developed and developing countries.  That answer is decentralized, democratic decision-making at the local level.  

For example, I work with a non-profit development organization that uses this community-based, empowerment approach to develop farming co-ops, health care programs, citizen participation, and other local development initiatives in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.  It’s called CLUSA and is a program of the National Cooperative Business Association (http://www.ncba.coop/pdf/clusa/CLUSAFactSheet.pdf).   

Despite the proven effectiveness of this approach in fostering cost-effective, sustainable local development, it represents a very small percentage of aid programs – for all of those reasons mentioned above.  

In short, we know what works at the local level, but how do we overcome the resistance by donors, recipient governments, and development organizations to implementing decentralized, democratic projects?  Some things are already moving in this direction.  Earlier in the article I mentioned that debt relief and donor funds are being increasingly targeted to countries that are becoming more democratic and less corrupt.  I also mentioned that performance accountability is being more carefully built in to assistance programs.  These represent important steps that could lead to more community-based initiatives.