Coming to the Aid of Africa

Abstract

The final case study returns to the theme of financing for development explored in chapter 5. Yet where this first case study chapter explored the macroeconomic architecture surrounding debt relief, chapter 7 examines the link between the welfare reforms that Gordon Brown introduced in the UK, and the ‘Global New Deal’ that he sought to promote abroad. The centrepiece of Brown’s ‘Global New Deal’ was his much-vaunted International Finance Facility (and, latterly, International Finance Facility for Immunisation). The IFF, it is argued here, was very much in keeping with Brown’s ‘golden rule’ to ‘borrow only to invest’ and his enthusiasm to use Private Finance Initiatives and Public-Private Partnerships to fund public goods. With overseas aid viewed as a form of global welfare, the IFF would frontload the finance needed for development and distribute it to those recipient countries that met the responsibilities demanded of them. Ascribing aid with the same contractual obligations of ‘rights and responsibilities’ however, served only to obscure the structural causes of inequality faced by many countries in the global South. Moreover, Brown’s own form of ‘conditionality’ would restrict still further the already-limited economic autonomy of those nations urgently in need of this aid.

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