It has now been 25 years since more than 1 million Ethiopians died as those of us lucky enough to live in the rich world sat transfixed in front of our television screens. The horrible suffering brought with it the biggest outpouring of charity ever seen as governments and ordinary people dug deep to stop it.

But a quarter of a century on foreigners are still feeding a huge number of Ethiopians. The Ethiopian government says poor rains mean 6.2 million of its people need food aid this year and has asked the international community to provide it.

Another 7 million hungry people are on a government-run but foreign-funded scheme that gives food in exchange for work, which means more than 13 million of the country’s 83 million people rely on foreign handouts to survive.

Aid agency Oxfam is now saying that food aid is trapping Ethiopia in a cycle of dependence on the West and that donations could be better spent.

In the valleys of northern Ethiopia much has changed since 1984 when hundreds of thousands of dying people streamed down from the hills desperate for food.

Chinese engineers in huge trucks hurtle down newly built roads financed by their government and children now flow from the hills on the way to school.

Ethiopians say they are sick of their image as a people beset by famine and war and point to foreign investors showing growing interest in their country.

This week I travelled to a small village called Abay where Oxfam and Ethiopian NGO Orda are trying to help the locals become independent of food aid so that, when a drought hits, they will be able to survive without charity.

Men worked fields rich with wheat, young boys threshed barley for a local brewery and women had set up self-help groups and were giving out loans so their members could buy the five sheep necessary to start a breeding business.

The area looked prosperous and the people said they felt more pride now.

A growing number of aid experts — many of them African — say that if more money was spent on schemes like this, rather than on food, then Ethiopians and other Africans dependent on food aid could eventually wean themselves off it.

“I am 100 percent confident that day will come,” one farmer told me, standing in his impressive field of wheat. “Begging is a shameful practice for Ethiopia.”

So is food aid making Africans dependent? Is it time donor countries cut back on it? Should more money be spent on helping people become self-sufficient? Could foreign direct investment improve things? Or is there another answer?

A project in Ethiopia that helps destitute women become self-reliant by providing them with paid employment has attracted a lot of attention from politicians visiting Addis Ababa for an international get-together.

Alem Abebe is a 14-year-old girl who left home three years ago and made her way to the capital. She now earns 50 US cents a day working at the Abebech Gobena project in one of the city’s slums. It’s not enough to send money home, but enough to survive — and to pay for night school.

But by the World Bank definition, Abebe and other women working at the project are still extremely poor: they earn much less than the daily income of $1.25 or roughly one euro that’s now used to measure poverty.

But the whole point isn’t to hand out money for free: but to help women who would be on the street get a job, an education - and a future.

It’s a departure from previous aid models, which saw large sums handed over by the West to African countries, a system that some say hasn’t really helped the world’s poorest continent.

“The model that’s coming up or that I’m proposing is essentially a model where Africa and Africans become equal partners with the rest of the world, not one where there’s a donor and a recipient where Africans are viewed as secondary citizens,” Dambisa Moyo, a Zambian author, told Reuters Africa Journal.

“This is really an environment where Africans are getting something, they’re getting paid for doing something, for being entrepreneurs, for generating something, for building products, for establishing infrastructure. It’s not the aid model where you get money for nothing,” said Moyo, whose book Dead Aid argues that Western generosity often doesn’t actually help in the long run.

Today the global financial crisis means that Western countries are trying to save their own economies and are no longer prepared to spend so much on aid. So is direct aid still a solution. Or are small projects that generate employment better at fighting poverty?

French Secretary of State for Cooperation Alain Joyandet is floating the idea of an on-line lottery to raise aid for Africa.
 
The plan is pretty modest - the aim is to raise around 10 million euros a year for projects such as boosting school access to girls in Africa.

Critics are already writing it off as an empty gesture, particularly as Africa is suffering from billion-dollar aid shortfalls as recession hits rich donor countries.

To put it in perspective, the World Food Programme said last month it had received just $3.7 billion of the $6.7 billion it needs this year — a shortfall that would take 300 years of such lottery takings to plug.

Some dismiss the plan as yet another PR gimmick intended to gloss over years of exploitation of the continent by rich world.

Others wonder whether it is really in the best of taste to link aid to the world’s poor with a game of chance.

“Yet again, it is really shows a lack of respect for Africa,” a contributor by the name of Aboubacar wrote on Joyandet’s blog.

Joyandet counters that this is an example of the “innovative funding” needed to raise awareness off Africa’s plight among a media-overloaded public.

The idea in itself is not new — the United Nations and others have toyed with the idea in the past.

There have even been suggestions that you could “piggy-back” well-established national lottery systems with games whose revenues would then target specific issues — a scratch card lottery for AIDS orphans, for example.

It is sensitive ground. But could they ultimately capture the public imagination in the same way that the Live Aid concerts launched in 1985 did?

World Bank President Robert Zoellick ended a visit to Africa this week with the pronouncement that this century belonged to the continent’s development despite damage to economies from the global financial crisis.

Those who remember what were flagged by some at the time as “Africa’s decades” in the 1980s and 1990s may have cause for scepticism given that in many countries they turned out disastrous despite early hopes.

But Africa’s economies had been growing at an unprecedented pace before the global financial crisis struck.

Zoellick acknowledged the immediate challenge required more resources to bolster regional integration as well as investments in energy, infrastructure and agriculture.

He said Africa deserves more attention and should be made a priority at international meetings like the Group of 20 developed and developing countries in the United States next month.

To make the case for more resources from donors, whose budgets are being strained by the financial crisis, Zoellick said Africans need to show they can use aid effectively and improve governance

Will African countries be able to show they can use aid effectively enough? Will this really be Africa’s century? If it is, then how auspicious is it for it to be kicked off with foreign aid?

Posted by George Fominyen, AlertNet’s humanitarian affairs correspondent for West and Central Africa, based in Dakar. He is also West Africa coordinator for Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Emergency Information Service.

The abduction of two Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) workers in Chad this month after a robbery at their compound near Sudan’s Darfur region has again brought to the fore the question of attacks on aid workers.

Aid workers in Chad told me assaults on compounds and car-jacking on the roads happen every week and that armed bandits are their biggest worry. But Chad is not unique. There have been at least 16 reported attacks on humanitarian workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo between January and June this year, according to statistics from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Fifteen of these attacks involved guns and in one case the attackers took hostages.

Worldwide, 260 humanitarian aid workers were killed, kidnapped or seriously injured in 2008, the London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) reported in a policy brief. This toll is the highest in 12 years and has spiked in the past three years, the study said.

But why are aid workers targets? They are supposed to be helping people.

“Humanitarian workers are seen as rich people in places where most of the population is poor,” said Philippe Adapoe, the country director of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Chad.

“In general aggressors target assets and money and we have visible assets such as cars, satellite phones, money and laptops.”

This may be so for robberies and muggings, but kidnappings?

The kidnapping of aid workers has soared by 3-1/2 times in the past three years - and it is mainly international staff because they are more valuable in terms of ransom and make a more visible political statement, the ODI said.

“Aid organisations may be attacked because they are perceived as collaborators with the ‘enemy’, be it a government, a rebel group or a foreign power; in other cases, the organisation itself may be the primary target, attacked for its own actions or statements, or to prevent or punish the delivery of aid to populations,” the ODI policy brief said.

And so humanitarian organisations often try to operate distinct from governments and in some cases avoid being escorted by U.N. forces on the ground, to maintain their independence. However it’s important organisations are not misled into believing that this in itself will result in increased security for their staff, the ODI report said.

After the abduction of the two MSF staff members in the east of Chad, Mahamat Hissene, the government’s spokesperson, told Radio France Internationale that his country would consider forcing all organisations to provide itineraries and to travel with armed escorts.

And so what options remain for aid workers around the world?

“Aid organisations are using a variety of strategies from using communications technology to warn each other about dangerous roads where attacks have occurred to further educating communities about their organisation’s mission in order to gain acceptance,” Larrissa Fast, an expert on violence against aid workers at the University of Notre Dame in the United States said in an interview on its website.

Many aid organisations now think gaining acceptance from host communities is vital for the security of their staff members. If they are seen by everyone - not just the immediate beneficiaries of relief - as part of the solution of a crisis and not a group of rich folks coming to add to their misery, they may become less of a target.

But are international relief organisations doing enough to get accepted and understood by their host communities? Time will tell.

(Photos: Top - Buckets await distribution to people displaced by war near the town of Gos Beida in eastern Chad, May 18, 2009. Reuters/Emmanuel Braun. Bottom - Aid workers helped by local villagers unload medical supplies at an airstrip near the isolated town of Obo, Central African Republic, July 9. Reuters/Joe Bavier.)

The United Nations has joined Zimbabwe’s power-sharing government in appealing for more than $700 million in humanitarian aid for the ruined country.

But while Western countries may show willing when it comes to emergency aid, they are still reluctant to give money to the government between President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, his old rival.

First, they say, there must be broader political reforms and a clearer demonstration of respect for human rights.

The Western countries have long been at odds with Mugabe, accusing him of ruining Zimbabwe after the seizure of white-owned farms, of widespread human rights abuses and of making a mockery of elections last year that were widely condemned outside Zimbabwe.

But if those countries don’t come up with the finance that the government needs, some believe there is a danger it could undermine prospects for change rather than strengthening them.

“My advice is for the international community to engage Zimbabwe as the opposite of this will only benefit hardliners,” Tsvangirai told a visiting French minister last week.

The unity government has said it won more than $1 billion in promised credit lines from African banks for private firms, but says it needs more than $8 billion for reconstruction.

Should Western countries aid the government now, or is it too soon?

You can have your say on the survey below. Your comments are welcome too.

The acknowledgement by Zimbabwe’s central bank governor that it raided the private bank accounts of companies and donors to fund President Robert Mugabe’s government during the economic crisis has increased speculation over his fate under the new national unity government.

Central Bank Governor Gideon Gono said the central bank took foreign currency from private accounts to help pay for some $2 billion in loans to state-owned companies and utilities and for power and grain imports. He said the government still had to repay about $1.2 billion, so the bank could repay the money it owes.

Heading the central bank at a time Zimbabwe was suffering economic collapse and hyperinflation that touched at least 231 million percent a year (according to official figures) was never going to be a badge of honour for the governor, but as he made clear in his statement, Zimbabwe’s problems went beyond economics.

“It was a political problem and not an economic one that drove us into the difficulties this nation experienced, and quasi-fiscal operations were a response to those political challenges we have now resolved through the inclusive government,” the statement said. “Our call is to let bygones be bygones and for everyone and every entity to start anew and open a new page.”

Gono has come under pressure from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) to resign since the former opposition party joined Mugabe in a unity government in February. Western diplomats have also said Gono’s departure could help bring a resumption of badly needed aid.

Are his days numbered now Tsvangirai and Mugabe seem to be working together more closely than many might have expected?

A U.N. investigator has castigated Kenya’s police force for hundreds of alleged extra-judicial killings and called for both its chief and the Attorney General to be fired immediately.
 
In a scathing indictment of the east African country’s security forces, Philip Alston, the U.N. rapporteur on extradicial executions, said he had received overwhelming evidence during a 10-day tour of systematic, widespread regular and carefully planned killings by the police. He said they were “free to kill at will” and did so with impunity for motives ranging from private disputes to extortion, to shooting a suspect instead of making an arrest. “The Kenyan police are a law unto themselves and they kill often and with impunity, ” said Alston, a law professor from Australia. In a statement laced with angry sarcasm, he accused the police of failing to provide him with virtually any of the information he sought, including the number of officers in the force. He supported allegations that police had killed 500 suspected members of the notorious Mungiki crime gang in 2007 in an attempt to exterminate it and 400, mostly opposition, demonstrators during a post election crisis last year — as reported by an official inquiry. Army and police are also accused of torturing and killing at least 200 people in an offensive to suppress a rebel movement in western Kenya.
 
Alston demanded the immediate dismissal of Police Commissioner Hussein Ali but did not stop there. He said long-serving Attorney General Amos Wako, who he accused of consistently obstructing attempts to prosecute those in high positions for extrajudicial executions, must also go, calling him the embodiment of a system of impunity. Alston added that Kenya’s judicial system was bankrupt and another obstacle to achieving justice.  And he even attacked President Mwai Kibaki for remaining completely silent about impunity.
 
Alston’s condemnation was perhaps the most high profile and powerful in recent years but it follows numerous reports by human rights groups about extrajudicial killings by the police. Ali, an army general who has led the force for five years, has survived numerous other controversies.
 
The government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, who as a sideline produces a popular television cop squad drama, immediately rubbished Alston’s statement, saying he had not been in the country long enough to draw accurate conclusions. But Kenya’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Nation, noted in an editorial that this was a routine response from the government and the U.N. official’s report could not be dismissed so lightly, an opinion shared by the other big daily, the Standard. But the government appears set to ignore even such high profile criticism, as it has done with allegations against the police in the past.
 
The case also underlines the divisions within Kenya’s unwieldy Grand Coalition government, set up almost a year ago to end ethnic bloodletting after the disputed election that killed around 1,300 people. Alston was invited to carry out his investigation by this very government, although it is not clear who did so. He said Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Justice Minister Martha Karua had expressed concern about his report. Odinga was quoted in the Nation as saying: “We must act on the report. No one will be spared. I am not willing to compromise on this one.” He doesn’t seem to have spoken to Mutua.  
 
But whatever Odinga says, nobody is holding their breath for a radical overhaul of the police despite wide public disgust over their tactics. A recent opinion poll showed that 70 percent of Kenyans surveyed felt the coalition government had achieved nothing since it was formed last April. Only 33 percent thought any political or business leader guilty of organising the election violence would ever be convicted. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who led mediation to end the crisis, warned that political manoeuvres delaying the establishment of a tribunal on the violence threatened the country’s stability.
 
Will Kenya ever tackle these fundamental problems? Will violent police ever be brought to book?

Earlier this month, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argued that Africa needs Western countries to cut long term aid that has brought dependency, distorted economies and fuelled bureaucracy and corruption. The comments on the blog posting suggested that many readers agreed. In a response, Savio Carvalho, Uganda country director for aid agency Oxfam GB, says that aid can help the continent escape poverty - if done in the right way:

In early January, I travelled to war-ravaged northern Uganda to a dusty village in Pobura and Kal parish in Kitgum District. We were there to see the completion of a 16km dirt road constructed by the community with support from Oxfam under an EU-funded programme.

The road is bringing benefits in the form of access to markets, education and health care. Some parents say their daughters feel safer walking to school on the road instead of through the bushes. Many families have used the wages earned from construction work to pay for school fees and medical treatment. This is the impact of aid.

Having lived and worked in east Africa, I have witnessed the positive effects of aid. But done badly, it can be very limiting and even has the potential to create more harm. To avoid this, it must be provided within an enabling environment in which it is used as a catalyst for change and not as an end in itself. Governments must show leadership through an accountable system.

For individuals, access to resources – including aid - is like an investment. Aid can build up poor people’s assets, support good governance and enhance skills and capacities to bring about transformation. But it can become a bane when it makes communities dependent, lazy and hopeless. Governments, aid agencies and the United Nations need to ensure the delivery of aid is well planned and coordinated, leading to higher self-reliance among poor communities.

Aid is also beneficial when trade is fair. There are several examples in Africa, like the case of coffee farmers in Uganda, where aid has been used effectively to improve the overall quality of the coffee seeds, thereby giving farmers better prices for their produce. When they have access to markets at home and abroad, they generate income which is ploughed back into increased output, better access to health and education, and overall improvement in the quality of their lives. To make this happen, developed countries need to stop procrastinating and put in place fair trade practices.

Aid works well if governments are accountable – in other words, when they are responsible and encourage active citizenship. On this continent, civil society is still weak and needs to be nourished. But stopping aid will not resolve frustrations about poor governance, which is partly a result of weak public scrutiny. Aid should be used to help fight corruption and promote accountability through active input from ordinary people.

As I have argued here, receiving aid is not just an act of charity. It should be understood as the right of poor communities to a life of dignity. As stated in international conventions, people have a right to good health, food, water and education. We all need to ensure the planet’s resources are equitably distributed. As Mahatma Gandhi said, you must be the change you want to see in the world.

So what do you think? Which argument is most convincing?

For those looking to invest in Africa, the best prospects are in Nigeria and Ethiopia according to a new index of potential investment destinations published this week.

But should anybody want to put money into Africa at a time the global financial crisis and falling prices for export commodities, on which the continent is so reliant, have discouraged investors who had begun to see some African countries as promising frontier markets?

“Africa is going to overtake the Middle East to become the second fastest growing region in the world after emerging Asia. It will be affected by the global financial crisis but it is much less exposed than many places,” Katharine Pulvermacher, chief executive of business consultancy African Rainbow said this week on the launch of its Star of Africa index.

The index’s creators told my colleague Peter Apps that potential growth in energy, water and communications consumption could amply reward investors taking the risk in Africa. South Africa, Mauritius and Tanzania took third, fourth and fifth place respectively on the index. Somalia, Chad and Eritrea were the least appealing countries for investors.

The International Monetary Fund’s most recent forecast of economic growth for Africa this year was 3.3 percent – much slower than the 5-6 percent of recent years but good by the standards of Western countries in recession. A senior IMF official noted recently, however, that African growth could be sharply lower than its forecasts.

“Remittances, tourism revenue and even aid, we feel could fall further,” said the IMF’s Africa Department Director Antoinette Sayeh.

The African markets that had attracted most foreign investment in recent years – not only developed South Africa but also countries such as Nigeria and Kenya – are among those that have so far been hardest hit, while smaller economies that may not have had so far to fall have been less touched.

Despite the global woes, bulls still cite long term changes in Africa such as improvements in political and economic openness, a decrease in the number of conflicts, new technology, emerging middle classes and long term investment from Asia as reasons for optimism. Zimbabwe’s stock exchange restarted on Thursday after a three-month halt and a still shaky power-sharing deal has brought some hopes of economic revival in what used to be a strong performer.

For some, looking to the long term is not enough, though. UK asset manager New Star – being bought by a rival - said this month it was winding up its Heart of Africa Fund due to deteriorating market conditions on the continent.

Is Africa a good bet for investors? What do you think?