Time to Play Fair

Leo is one of the most resolute women I've ever met. A veteran of one of Johannesburg's largest aids orphanages and trained in child care, she looks after my 18-month-old daughter while my wife and I are at work — and she can be just as firm with adults as she is soft with kids. Six years ago, when she discovered the house she and her two sons were renting was up for sale, she bid for it at auction and won. But when she went to see the loan officer at the local branch of one of South Africa's biggest banks, he didn't want to know her. She didn't have enough for a deposit, he said. She was a bad risk.

Leo took time off work and went to plead her case every day for three weeks. Finally, in a last-ditch attempt before her home was reauctioned, she visited the office of the bank's ceo, sat herself down in his reception area and waited. After about six hours, the puzzled ceo invited her into his office. He listened to her story, reviewed her file, sensed her resolve and agreed to loan her the cost of the house. "You just have to persevere and be brave," Leo, who is still paying off her mortgage, says today. "If people tell you that you can't see the boss, don't listen to them. You've got to be determined."

Getting ahead is no easy task in Africa. It takes a plan, purpose and sometimes a streak of stubbornness. Those qualities are all present in the campaign to help end poverty in Africa that you've heard so much about lately. When the leaders of the rich G-8 countries — essentially the world's bank managers — meet in Scotland next month, everyone, from a pair of crusading rock stars to a gaggle of African premiers and presidents, will be campaigning for a better deal for the world's poorest continent. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has already convinced his G-8 counterparts to forgive the debt of 18 of the world's poorest countries, a deal worth more than $40 billion. At the summit in Gleneagles he will try to win other concessions.

But why should the world help Africa at all? The simple answer, says Niall FitzGerald, chairman of British news agency Reuters and a passionate backer of a new deal for Africa, is morality. "The rich world has brought its gifts to Africa: first exploitation and then indifference," he said at the World Economic Forum's Africa summit in Cape Town earlier this month. "There is across the world a new awareness of the moral reprehensibility of what we have allowed to happen in Africa." There is also self-interest. Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa points out that disease and despair will hurt the rich world by driving illegal immigration and the dissemination of killer germs if left unchecked. "You can't build a fire wall around Africa and expect its problems not to spread," Mkapa said at the meeting.

But the rich world has given Africa around $1 trillion over the past four decades and the continent is poorer than ever. And many of Africa's woes have been self-inflicted: corruption, wars, mismanagement. True and true. Over the past decade or so, however, there has been a new and serious attempt by many of Africa's leaders to start fixing some of those problems. Countries such as Ghana and Mozambique, once riven by civil war and coups, have enjoyed tiger-like economic growth thanks to better leadership and foreign investment. Nigeria, whose name has become synonymous with fraud and scam artists, has started tackling corruption. And former advocates of "African socialism" such as Tanzania have embraced the free market and begun to grow.

On balance, say Africa's boosters, much of the continent would now benefit from a "big bang" injection of aid and better trade conditions. Africa is not going to change overnight and there is sure to be frustrating backsliding from some countries. Two weeks ago, for example, the government in Ethiopia, which has won praise for its reforms over the past few years, was behind a violent crackdown on opposition supporters. It does seem possible, though, that with the right combination of policies we will look back in 20 years' time and see 2005 as a turning point.

But it's going to take more than just debt forgiveness. A boost in aid will help. African leaders can also do more, including dropping their destructive and misguided loyalty to rogue regimes like Zimbabwe's. Perhaps most crucially, though, Africa needs a chance to sell its grain and cotton and fruit and vegetables to the rest of the world. Unless Europe, the U.S. and Japan make a serious attempt to cut their distorting and self-indulgent agricultural subsidies at the World Trade Organization meeting in Hong Kong later this year, Africa will always struggle to break out of its poverty trap. Forgiving debt without opening up markets would be like sponsoring a sports team and then asking the players to take the field with their hands tied behind their backs. It's time to come up with the money Africa needs now. But to make sure Africa can pay its own way in the future, the rich world has to let the continent go to work as well.