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The farmers of western Niger normally spend the first few months of every year filling their mud-brick storage bins with grain. But last November's harvest was a bad one, and many of the bins this year are only half-filled or empty. "It's not normal," says Amadou Salou, a farmer in the town of Male Haoussa, a few hours' drive north of the capital, Niamey. Sheltering under a tree from the scorching mid-day sun with other village elders, Salou sets out the equation. "We have too many mouths to feed and not enough food," he says. Despite the nearby emergency feeding center that treats the hungriest, two infants died last year. This season, Salou fears they may lose more.

A year after the leaders of the world's richest nations gathered in Scotland to work out a deal to help Africa, the results are still in the balance. The deal — a doubling of aid for the continent by 2010 and debt cancellation for eligible, heavily indebted poor countries, most of them African — was hailed as a breakthrough. For a brief moment, to the sounds of a global rock concert and British [an error occurred while processing this directive] Prime Minister Tony Blair's optimism, the world's focus was on Africa and the hope was that the continent was on the verge of turning itself around. But as the problems of Niger show, Africa's struggles did not miraculously vanish.

Drought and food shortages, often exacerbated by government mismanagement, continue in Niger and its neighbors in the Horn of Africa and in parts of Southern Africa. Earlier this month James Morris, the head of the United Nations World Food Program (wfp), warned that more funding for food aid was needed in Sudan or peace II there could unravel. Oxfam complained in May that less than one-seventh of the funds the United Nations and aid groups need for Congo had been given. As the G-8 leaders prepare to gather again, skeptics are asking if their resolutions really matter on the ground.

No deal, however substantial, could reasonably have been expected to solve the problems of Africa in a year or even a decade. And change is happening. Countries such as Mozambique and Zambia have channeled the money they once spent on debt payments into their health and education systems. Rich countries spent more than $100 billion on aid last year, up from $80 billion in 2004 — though more than 80% of that increase was poured into reconstruction efforts and debt relief in Iraq.

There is also change in the way aid is being financed and delivered, not just because of last year's G-8 deal, but also because the focus on Africa and aid delivery in the run-up to the G-8 summit encouraged some U.N. agencies and ngos to rethink their business. "We can do it better," says Hilary Benn, Britain's Secretary of State for International Development and one of the leading figures in the debate about aid delivery. "We should all ask ourselves the question: 'What is the most effective form in which we can give support?'"

ngos have long struggled to get the balance right between development and emergency aid. As total foreign aid to the developing world has declined over the past two decades, it is long-term projects that have suffered most. "We risk getting into a pernicious cycle where money for long-term recovery is being diverted to fund emergency relief," says head of Oxfam in East Africa, Paul Smith-Lomas. "If long-term projects are raided every time we face a crisis, the region will never progress."

The U.N. has come up with an answer, a retooled version of a 15-year-old emergency relief reserve, now called the Central Emergency Response Fund (cerf). Until a few months ago, U.N. agencies had to apply for funding allocation on a case-by-case basis, a bureaucratic process that often slowed the delivery of vital aid until starving kids filled television screens. (Benn likens it to a fire service forced to pass around a hat before responding to an alarm.) From this year, the cerf can be accessed within three days, most of the money is to be given as grants and not loans, and the total pot, to be replenished regularly, should grow tenfold to $500 million.