Executive Summary on Africa

It may seem like we are giving a lot of aide towards Africa, but we are really not doing much at all. Quantitatively, many countries, including the United States, do not meet the quota of .7% set up for the international community. Then, 61% of the international aide given is phantom aide, or aide that does not target the poorest countries due to poor planning and goes to excess administration costs. Our world needs to make reform in our aide policies to ensure that every country is giving what it is required and that the money goes to those who need it most.
Currently the 7 largest economies only give 0.07% of their national income in real aide, the largest offenders being France and the US whose aide is 90% phantom aide. If we want to achieve our goal of relieving world poverty, we must ensure that our net resources flow north (wealthy countries) to south (poor countries). Aide is flowing north to south at $69 billion dollars a year. However, the trade system discriminates against poor countries because the financial flow, trade flow, and ecological debt flow south to north at hundreds of billions of dollars per year. Basically, we are "robbing Peter to pay Peter." This highlights the need for aide reform from the wealthy countries.
The reason for all of this phantom aide is that we are practicing one way accountability. There is a lack of downward accountability, or holding the recipients of the aide responsible to comply. Corrupt officials use the money for salaries or send it to profitable places like the oil-rich Middle East. In order to create a system of mutual accountability, the rich countries need to clear policies in developing countries for accepting aide, make mutual commitments, create national and international forums to review progress, and create new mechanisms to increase volume and predictability of aide. These safeguards would ensure that the countries who are not meeting the quota begin to meet it and that the countries accepting aide use it for the correct things.
As a class, we can help to bring about thee reforms in aide distribution by supporting candidates and organizations that follow mutual accountability. For example, Christian Children's fund is educating children in the APAC district of Uganda how to monitor public funds coming into their school, and they have actually been able to stop corrupt teachers. By supporting organizations such as these that are in it for no monetary gain and who are changing things at the root of the problem, it is very possible for us to eliminate poverty.