Whitney

(To learn more about Goodafrican, check out their website here)

We passionately believe that TRADE NOT AID is the only viable strategy for Africa’s economic and social development. Handouts create dependency and stifle innovation, whilst Trade provides opportunities for economic empowerment and wealth creation. Trade generates employment and helps to build communities. It has the potential to create equitable partnerships between growers and consumers.

Africa has received over US$ 500 billion in Aid over the last 50 years, and yet the continent remains mired in poverty, blighted by systemic corruption, and with children dying needlessly from preventable diseases.

Unless there is a radical shift in the way the world sees Africa, there is no foreseeable hope of ever reaching the Millennium Development Goals of universal primary education, poverty reduction and the elimination of avoidable infant deaths that were set for 2015.

Aid, whether humanitarian or economic, confers enormous power and influence on donors to the extent that the political leadership in recipient countries are more accountable to them than to their own people. Any African Finance Minister will tell you that whilst dealing with donors is presented as a collaborative partnership, in reality governments are told what to do and when to do it. This paternalistic attitude not only informs a country’s policy matrix, but is a key factor in determining a framework that favours donors and the mindset of their bureaucrats.

In 2005, the year when Africa and African issues were placed at the centre of G8 discussions during the Gleneagles summit, media attention and the voices that analysed or offered solutions to the continent’s problems were predominantly those of European specialists on Africa. There was not an African to be seen.

Uganda, the corporate headquarters for Good African Coffee is an example of a country’s chronic dependency on donor finance. In 2006, foreign aid accounted for over 42% of the Uganda’s recurrent expenditure budget and 100% of the development budget.

In the leading industrialised nations of the world the case for trade as the engine for economic development is indisputable. The need for trade in the growth of nations is so critical that it has caused wars, driven colonial domination and helped to create the current unjust international trade system. In the last 30 years the massive economic expansion of India, Japan, Thailand, Singapore and China testify to the fact that trade stimulates growth. These countries have developed an industrial capacity to export attractive and affordable goods that have been instrumental in producing the accelerated growth of their economies.