British Prime Minister Tony Blair's commission on Africa has come up with a road map to recovery for the continent, but countries must now cooperate and focus on priorities if the project is to succeed, the only American member of the task force said.
Former US Senator Nancy Kassebaum Baker said on Tuesday she was optimistic the commission's report, due to be published tomorrow, would give fresh momentum to tackling the continent's crippling problems of health, poverty and conflict.
"There is a road map here, we can make priorities of what we can accomplish and do it right," she said. "We are not going to solve this overnight. The key is whether there is going to be a willingness to stick with it."
Blair created the 17-member commission to find ways of helping the continent, which is ravaged by civil wars, crippled by debt and HIV/AIDS.
He hopes the commission's findings will spur international action and has made helping Africa a key priority for Britain's presidencies of both the G-8 group of wealthy nations and the EU this year.
The report calls for an immediate doubling of annual international aid to Africa to US$50 billion, the removal of trade barriers that keep poor countries from getting their goods into Western markets, debt forgiveness and action to tackle poor governance, corruption and war in Africa.
According to an official familiar with the work of the commission, half of whose members are African, its 400-page final report also recommends that the debts of poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and African Development Bank be written off, but stresses that recipients must be committed to good governance, and use the money to deliver "development, economic growth and the reduction of poverty."
"It is not enough to say Africa is corrupt," commissioner Anna Tibaijuka told reporters in London last month. "We have to ask ourselves who is corrupting Africa. It is not enough to say Africa has stolen money. We have to ask who is banking the money."
Some Africans, though, have expressed skepticism.
"Instead of proposing new, radical and bold ideas, commissioners recycled the same told, tired and worn-out cliches," Andrew Mwenda, a special correspondent for Kenya's East African weekly, wrote in a weekend account.
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