ONE 2013 DATA Report: Financing the Fight for Africa’s Transformation

Content for this blog is taken from here, authored by Ben Leo, Global Policy Director at ONE.

Ahead of the G8 summit on the 17th and 18th June, the ONE campaign published their 2013 Data Report, which focuses on tracking how developing countries are progressing on the Millennium Development Goal targets using the ‘MDG Progress Index’.   The report also measures how sub-Saharan African governments are faring against their own spending commitments in three poverty-busting sectors: health, agriculture and education. Finally, it offers recommendations for how the global community can intensify its efforts in a sprint to the MDG finish line.

The report shows that some significant progress is happening.

• There are 10 sub-Saharan African MDG ‘trailblazers’ and dozens of countries have improved their performance.
• Sub-Saharan African resource flows have quadrupled since 2000, including domestic government expenditures, which account for almost 80% of all available finance. Domestic revenues, foreign investment, donor assistance and remittances are all playing an important role in boosting growth and development.
• Countries that allocate more of their budget to health, agriculture and education are, on average, progressing faster on the MDGs. For example, over the last decade, Burkina Faso spent a whopping 52% of its national budget on these three sectors and is currently on track to achieve four MDG targets (out of eight) and partially on track for another two.

But also areas that need considerable work.

• Some countries are falling behind on the MDG targets and slowing down regional progress. Nine of the fourteen global ‘laggard’ countries are in sub-Saharan Africa.
• African governments are falling far short of their own spending targets, and this has very real consequences. Take a large country such as Nigeria, which alone accounts for 11% of annual child deaths – if it were to meet its health spending commitment over the next three years, the additional resources could amount to $22.5 billion. This could pay for vaccinations for every single child, anti-malarial bed nets for every citizen, and treatment for every HIV-positive person, saving millions of lives.
• Many donors are also off track in delivering on their promises, such as reaching aid levels of 0.7% of GNI by 2015 and delivering half of those increases to Africa. While aid flows rose dramatically from 2000 to 2010, we have now seen two consecutive years of decline, and, shockingly, sub-Saharan Africa is bearing the brunt of these cuts.

Famine in the Sahel

The aftermath of the food crisis in the Horn of Africa is ongoing and the effects of the famine in Niger in 2010 are still being felt and yet a new crisis is looming. More than 18 million people in 8 countries could be affected and over 1 million children under 5 risk severe acute malnutrition if food shortages and drought in the Sahel escalate. Over the last 12 months 43 million have been added to the number of people going hungry in the world due to severe food shortages.

Calls for early action to prevent a famine in the Sahel have been made but will the international community respond rapidly enough? A failure to respond to early warnings and calls for help has been widely cited as contributing to the scale of the crisis in the Horn of Africa, and detailed in Oxfam’s report A Dangerous Delay.

The escalating drought has already depleted food stocks as of March 2012 and harvest is not until September. Grain production in many areas of the Sahel is 36% lower than for 2011. Increasing food prices due to chronic shortages and speculation as well as regional conflicts, particularly in Mali, have compounded the situation as have untreated locust outbreaks able to move across the area. As with most famines, it may have been sparked by the drought but a lot of other factors, infrastructural, political and social, have combined to cause this escalating crisis.

So far the international community has committed to half ($700 million) the total amount in aid called for in December 2011. But the crisis is expected to get a lot worse before it gets better if the international community does not take urgent and significant action.

While future plans to break the cycle of famine (this will be the third drought in the Sahel in ten years) must focus more on prevention, the situation in the Sahel, quoted as having never been this bad, demands international attention now.