Counterpoint: UN MDGS and U.S. Aid to Africa: Ineffective and Unrealistic (United Nation's Millennium Development Goals ) (Report‪)‬

Ambitious, magnanimous, laudable, idealistic, and humanitarian--these are a few of the adjectives used to describe the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Africa, the location of many of the world's poorest nations, is generally the focal point of discussion relating to achievement of these goals. Publicly supporting the goals is chic. As leader of the 2005 (38 summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair challenged the United States and other (38 member nations to double their aid to Africa. Additionally, Blair called for canceling debts owed by poor African nations. (1) The entertainer Bono, demonstrating his commitment to the cause, has founded a lobbying organization to persuade the U.S. and other wealthy nations to increase their aid to poor African countries. (2) Economist Jeffrey Sachs, prominent in his roles as director of both Columbia University's Earth Institute and the UN Millennium Project, is, like Blair and Bono, on the more-aid-to-Africa bandwagon. He, too, has called for donor nations to double their aid to Africa while advising poor African countries to simply ignore hundreds of billions of dollars of debt. (3) Spurred by the news media, many public figures are advocating dramatic increases in U.S. aid to Africa. These activists miss no opportunity to pique the collective American consciousness with images of starving African children, statistics on African poverty and life expectancies, and tired, shopworn cliches about how selfish Americans share only a tiny percentage of their vast wealth with inhabitants of impoverished nations. While the UN MDGs are indeed praiseworthy, they are also impractical and unattainable. The proposed time frame for their completion is years too short. The deluge-of-money approach to solving the problems of Africa has not worked; the U.S. and other wealthy nations have pumped money into Africa for several decades with little to show for it. Part of the problem is that African governments lack sufficient logistical and practical infrastructure to effectively oversee receipt and distribution of aid from donor nations. Accountability is also an issue; many African nations pegged to receive increased aid are rife with corruption while others risk falling into the trap of perpetual aid dependency. A lack of good governance also stands in the way of fulfilling the UN MDGs. Historically, strength, efficiency, and integrity have not been hallmarks of African governments. Helping Africa climb out of poverty should be a world concern, but flooding the continent with money over the next eight years is not a workable or wise solution.