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The Development Dialogue: Reflections of an African
Practitioner
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 1
Introduction
According to the African Development Bank, 2 net external financing to
Africa in the year 2000 was approximately US$26 billion, a continued and
sharp decline from the peak years of the 1980s.
This compares with the goal of US$64 billion annually set by the New
Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) to enable the region to
achieve the estimated 7 per cent annual growth which is needed to meet
the International Development Goals, particularly the goal that would reduce
by half the proportion of Africans living in poverty by the year 2015.
This ambitious NEPAD goal would seem to fly in the face of the message
conveyed by the trend in official assistance, a message of the need for change
in the approach to and management of the aid processes.
The need for change has been the source of several studies in the past few
years. For example, in Foreign Aid in Africa, Jerker Carlsson, Gloria Samalekae
and Nicolas Van de Walle point out that: “Development aid is a phenomenon
of the post-war period. As such, it has grown considerably and given
rise to a number of institutions, bilateral as well as multilateral, solely employed
in delivering aid to poor and developing countries. Aid has traditionally
been seen as something temporary, something that can only complement
existing national resources and effort. After almost forty years in
existence, aid has become something permanent.”
The entitlement perception
A review of aid and the dialogue associated with it must start with the attitude
toward aid, an attitude which has contributed to the dependency on aid.
Two generations since the abolition of slavery, Africans continue to point
to the debilitating effects of slavery and colonialism and to the reparation
that is owed to Africa for the imposed interruption in its evolution to statehood
and the exploitation of its resources.
1 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (Liberia) holds a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University.
She is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the Modern Africa Growth and Investment
Company (MAGIC), and Senior Adviser to the Modern Africa Fund Managers (MAFM).
Johnson Sirleaf has been Minister of Finance in Libera and was a presidential candidate in the 1997
Liberia general elections and prior to that, she served for five years as Assistant Administrator and
Director of the Regional Bureau for Africa of UNDP.
2 African Development Bank, 2001, African Development Report.