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In the context of World Refugee Day on June 20 and African Diaspora & Development Day (ad3) on July 02, Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie from the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), suggests that helping the West to wean itself of African aid would be “a great leap forward for humanity”.

In Western media coverage African (and other) refugees and asylum seekers are frequently vilified as illegal aliens, as leeches sucking all the good out of a generous but gullible West taken for a ride by menacing schemers. Similarly, recent media coverage about Africa has created the distinct impression that Africa is a helpless burden, totally dependent on generous Western aid, constantly needy, lacking in its own agency. And yet the reality is quite the opposite. To understand this, you need to see the story the media never tells.

The bulk of aid to reach ordinary Africans comes from Africans themselves in the form of self-help. Moreover, Africa is in fact a big aid donor to the West. To the extent that Africa is dependent upon aid, the vast majority of the “aid” that actually reaches ordinary Africans and communities comes from Africans themselves – those people living in the diaspora who regularly send money, called remittances, home. Monies that flow in to Africa via a combination of formal and informal channels amounts to roughly $200 billion a year, according to World Bank estimates. Although this figure exceeds both official aid and foreign investment for the continent you will not hear the media talk about Africans being their own biggest aid donors and investors.

Africa’s aid to Britain

But the media’s oversight does not stop there. Africa is also a huge aid donor to the West. Taking Ghana as a case study, researchers for Save the Children Fund, a UK-based charity, estimated that between 1999 and 2004, the total number of doctors registered in the UK and trained in Ghana, doubled from 143 to 293. By 2003/4 an estimated cumulative total of 1021 Ghanaian nurses had registered in the UK. The researchers estimate that Ghana has foregone around £35 million of its training investment in health professionals. In comparison, the UK has saved £65 million in training costs by recruiting Ghanaian doctors since 1998. For all of Africa this subsidy amounts to billions of dollars a year.

However, Africa’s giving does not stop there. Africa sells its commodities at give-away prices because rich countries skew their markets through tariffs and subsidies to ensure that little value can be added to raw products at source in Africa. Other subsidies enable American cotton farmers or European beef farmers to dump their products at artificially low prices on African markets, meaning that it is Africa that is keeping Western farmers in business. Yet more aid from Africa comes in the form of capital flight sent to Swiss and other bank accounts by corrupt officials and of course investors who lack confidence in the stability and profitability of African economies.

African Aid Conditionality Summit

Helping the West wean itself off African aid would in fact be a great leap forward for humanity. What a pity, though, that Africa does not impose its own conditionality upon its aid recipients. Instead, African leaders, civil society activists and others are inadvertently complicit in perpetuating the myth that 2005 is a make-or-break year for Africa and that the G8 summit is terribly important or worth a lot of our energy.

Neither is true. Indeed, even more significant than the G8 summit would be a summit among Africans in Africa and the diaspora to decide how to maximize the impact of the aid that flows from Africa and how to maximize the impact of the aid and investment that flows into Africa.

Here is a win-win-win proposal to achieve the former, given that this is Refugee Week. This is a win for African refugees, a win for Africa and a win for the Western societies where so many refugees find themselves today.

In addition to having the right to safe haven when fleeing persecution in their countries of origin, numerous African refugees and asylum seekers (and, of course, people from other parts of the world) actually arrive in the West with valuable skills and experience. Skills and experience that could further help prop up Britain’s ailing National Health Service or NHS, already heavily dependent upon nurses and doctors from Africa.

And yet, far too many such skilled and experienced refugees and asylum-seekers find themselves languishing on the margins of UK society blocked from active paid employment by a combination of regulatory impediments, institutionally racist attitudes and lack of job-preparedness among potential applicants.

Refugee fighting fund – “Live8419”

We need a fighting fund to enable refugee and asylum groups to tackle these numerous obstacles themselves, whether it’s a question of more and better training or lobbying for changes in the law.

The benefits to refugees and asylum-seekers are obvious – the opportunity to regain a sense of self-confidence, hope and dignity rather than be the focus of constant, vicious media hostility; the opportunity to invest in their own personal development; the opportunity to better support loved ones and friends back home; the opportunity, one day, to deploy enhanced skills back in Africa, where they are so desperately needed.

African governments will win because they will have a better chance of retaining talent at home. Of course, African governments and other employers will have to make far more effort to create the sort of environment that will encourage workers to stay in Africa. Otherwise, they will continue to vote with their feet.

The win for the Western societies in which refugees and asylum-seekers will work are also obvious.

Efforts to create this win-win-win scenario are already underway but we need to do more. This is why as part of its annual African Diaspora & Development Day (ad3) on Saturday 2 July this year the African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) has called on African performers to take to what it has called the “Live8419” stage in London to help raise some money to support this effort.

Of course, under normal circumstances we provide this aid directly to the British government. However, the absence of good governance gives us cause for concern. Amnesty International has recently questioned the legality of the detention of asylum-seekers in Britain. Similarly, the British government is implicated in the scandal of the US-controlled illegal detention camp at Guantanimo Bay in Cuba. In light of these concerns, we shall channel our aid via refugee and asylum-seeker led organisations.

With leading African artists relegated to performing in a village somewhere in Cornwall on 2 July we thought it important – some 11 years after apartheid was finally defeated – for African performers to have a presence in London on that day. The excitement will not stop there as African performers at Live8419 will for the first time ever perform the hit song, “Do they know it’s summertime?” written by AFFORD to raise more African aid for Britain. This world exclusive will undoubtedly set the media world alight.

Enterprise Africa! - ad3 2005

And here is a proposal to help Africans maximize the impact of the support they already provide to counterparts back home in Africa. A 2004 BBC survey of the views of 7,500 Africans living in the urban areas of 10 African countries gave a clear picture of their major concerns. Some 20% of respondents identified securing a well-paid job as their main concern. Two out of three respondents said making money is a priority for them. Far from being an example of avarice or greed, this desire to make money focuses attention upon African peoples’ aspirations to make something of their lives and to enjoy basic economic security.

With a job and reasonable economic security more Africans will take care of their own basic needs of health, education, housing, food, clothing, leisure, etc. More people in productive employment, most likely through small and medium sized enterprises would dramatically reduce dependency on an increasingly bloated and self-serving aid industry. An aid industry that will swell further if official aid to Africa was indeed doubled.

That is why AFFORD’s annual ad3 in 2005 will focus on enterprise in Africa - mobilizing African diaspora resources to help create and sustain enterprises, jobs and wealth in Africa. The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Professor Wangari Maathai, will be on hand to provide the keynote address and share her experience of working with grassroots women and communities to plant over 30 million trees and in the process provide people relegated to the margins of society with increased economic security, dignity, hope and self-confidence.

Self-determination, self-help, self-reliance, self-respect, and self-confidence will be our watchwords on 2 July and beyond. Every African in the diaspora needs to take personal responsibility to invest and help create and sustain just one entrepreneur or job, not through charity but through social enterprise. In less than the 30 years it has taken Professor Maathai’s Green Belt Movement to plant 30 million trees we shall have the equivalent self-sustaining tree of hope, dignity, fulfilling and rewarding human existence in Africa.

* Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie works for the London-based African Foundation for Development (AFFORD), organizers of the annual African Diaspora & Development Day (see www.afford-uk.org) on 2 July at The Rocket, London Metropolitan University

* Please send comments to [email protected]