** This post is from Alertnet, the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s global  humanitarian news Web site.**

Earthquakes, floods, the global recession and recurrent famines have been keeping aid professionals across the world as busy as ever. Such crises hit poor countries the hardest, focusing increasing attention on preventing and preparing for disasters rather than dealing with their devastating aftermath.

The European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, is one of the biggest sources of humanitarian and development aid in the world. For emergency response to recent earthquakes in Indonesia, it has provided $4.4 million - more than any other donor so far.

To help the Philippines currently recovering from two typhoons, the European Union and some member-states have contributed a total of $5.6 million - again, more than sent or promised by any other foreign donor.

How to help the developing world, not just when they are disasters, will be at the core of debates among heads of states, top European Union officials, Nobel Prize winners and other experts at an international conference in Stockholm between Oct. 22 and Oct. 24, called European Development Days.

Ahead of the conference, European Union Commissioner for Development and Humanitarian Aid Karel De Gucht will take questions from readers on this year’s topics for discussion: the impact of the economic crisis on developing countries, climate change and the link between democracy and development.

You can participate by using the comments section below or by using the #askEUaid tag on Twitter. Please post your questions by Thursday, Oct. 15.

We will get as many of your questions to De Gucht as possible and will publish his replies by the end of the week, so keep checking back!

New to Twitter? If you aren’t using Twitter already but want to post a question or see what other people are asking De Gucht through Twitter, just get yourself a Twitter account, search for the #askEUaid tag and view all questions. You can post a 140-character question yourself, making sure you use the #askEUaid tag somewhere in your post so it sits with all the other posts from people across the Twittersphere.

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.

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?

If anyone in Africa was worried that the global financial crisis might dim China’s interest in the continent, President Hu Jintao will be visiting this week to give some reassurances - as well as possibly to temper any unrealistic hopes for the amount of assistance to be expected.

As Chris Buckley reported from Beijing, this visit is also about China showing the wider world that it is a responsible power.

The fact that none of the countries Hu will visit is among Africa’s economic or resource heavyweights - Mali, Senegal, Tanzania and Mauritius - is seen as a sign that China wants to send a message that its engagement with Africa is about much more than resources.

Trade between China and Africa rose to $107 billion last year and more deals are expected on this visit. Nearly all of Africa's exports to China still come from a handful of countries rich in oil or minerals, though, and now the global downturn has put those in more doubt.

China’s involvement in Africa is a subject we looked at recently. Alistair Thomson in Dakar found that even if some Chinese investments in Africa were losing their lustre, many Chinese firms were taking a longer-term view to pursue strategic expansion - and some were hunting for bargains. For China, Africa also offers an important destination for exports, as any visit to even the most remote African marketplace will quickly show.

Growing trade relations with China were one of the things seen by Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo in a previous blog post as a way for Africa to emerge better off from the financial crisis and less dependent on Western aid.

But China’s involvement in Africa has brought concern from some in the West - quite apart from those who may stand to lose out on the business front - with some critics saying Beijing’s interest is too focused on the drive to secure resources and pays little heed to the kind of thing that Western donors say they want to promote, such as elections, human rights and the fight against corruption.

Will Africa be able to depend on China in the long term? How healthy is that going to be? What do you think?

Pictures: Money changer Kwami Longange poses for a portrait on a streetcorner in Goma in eastern Congo, February 9, 2009. REUTERS/Finbarr O'Reilly

China's President Hu Jintao delivers a speech in Beijing December 31, 2008. REUTERS/Jason Lee

Far from being all bad news for Africa, the global financial crisis is a chance to break a dependence on development aid that has kept it in poverty, argues Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, who has just published a new book “Dead Aid”.

Moyo’s book, her first, comes out at a time when Western campaigners, financial institutions and some African governments have been warning of the danger posed to Africa by the crisis and calling for more money from developed countries as a result. The former World Bank and Goldman Sachs economist spoke to Reuters in London.

“I’m not saying its going to be easy, I’m just saying that there is a real opportunity for policymakers to focus on coming up with more innovative ways of financing economic development. In a way the crisis actually provides the African governments with the situation where they cannot rely on aid budgets coming through from the West.”

Moyo believes more than $1 trillion in development aid over the past 50 years has only entrenched Africa’s poverty, distorted economies and fuelled bureaucracy and corruption. She sees alternatives such as encouraging trade - particularly with emerging markets - encouraging foreign direct investment, microfinancing for enterprise and seeking funds from capital markets.

Moyo is not discouraged by the fact that all those options appear more difficult in the current environment.

“It just means the onus is on African governments to come up with a more compelling story as to why African governments are overseeing real asset investment not derivative products we don’t really understand.”

“If you focus on traditional markets like Europe and the United States, you come to the conclusion that markets are really damaged and it’s very hard to raise money in those markets, but if you start to look towards China for example which has $4 trillion of reserves, all of a sudden you could see there might be another opportunity to do a bond issue in the Chinese market for example.”

“The model that’s coming up, that I’m proposing, is essentially one where Africa and Africans become equal partners with the rest of the world, not one where there is kind of a donor and a recipient, where Africans are kind of viewed as secondary citizens,” she said.

“There is no other system, whether a political system or a business system, that has stayed as the status quo for 60 years when we all know it’s not doing what it’s supposed to do, it’s not generating growth and it’s not alleviating poverty.”

Moyo is not worried about the impact of aid being taken away:

“It actually tends to pool at the top so it’s not like the average African is going to suffer. They don’t see the aid anyway. Essentially it‘s going to really affect the bureaucratic processes at the top and would really impact on corruption.”

“You could take me to country X in Africa and say ‘look at this girl here and she’s going to school because of aid’. Yes, that’s true but on a macro aggregate perspective these economies are not growing. They’re not growing fast enough to ensure that when that girl is done with her schooling she can find a job.”

Moyo is unimpressed by Western campaigners such as rock stars Bob Geldof and Bono calling for lots more aid for Africa.

“I fundamentally object to the notion that Africa needs more aid and I do think it’s time to have many more Africans speak out, especially the policymakers, because many of the policymakers actually don’t support aid  and yet they stay in the background and they allow this money to come into the economy.”

“You very rarely see Africans on the global stage saying ‘actually we would like to have much more aid please’.”

“I do think a gap has opened up to allow other people to formulate a view on coming to the global debate and offering opinions as to what they think Africans want. But maybe we should start a website called ‘Ask the African’ because I think you might be quite surprised to find that people say ‘we want jobs’, I wouldn’t mind a flat screen television, I wouldn’t mind having my kids go on holiday sometimes ...’”

Picture: Helen Jones photography

I first met Raed al-Athamna when he was driving a journalist friend of mine around Gaza in his yellow, stretch-Mercedes taxi during the tense and violent days after Gaza militants captured Gilad Shalit, a young Israeli soldier, in the summer of 2006.

Raed seemed to be a good ‘fixer’ - attentive, sensible and with far-from-perfect but perfectly understandable English.

A few months later, I interviewed him in the rubble of Beit Hanoun - after Israeli tank shells slammed in to a relative’s home killing 18 members of his extended family early one morning as most were still sleeping.

Israel said a technical mishap caused the shells to stray from their intended targets and in to the residential neighbourhood where the Athamnas lived.

Perhaps because his immediate family had escaped the tragedy in their nearby home, and perhaps because loss is so intimately entwined in the lives of Gazans, Raed seemed sanguine and calm in the interview and still confident that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was possible.

Raed’s business hit a lean patch soon after that interview - when many of the foreign journalists he worked with stopped making the trip in to Gaza as the menace of kidnapping and the unpredictability of the factional fighting between Fatah and Hamas effectively put the Strip off limits.

Despite the dip in business Raed decided it was time to leave Beit Hanoun - whose location near the Israeli border in the northeast corner of Gaza made it a favourite for rocket launchers and thus a regular scene of clashes and airstrikes - so he took his life’s savings, some $70,000, and got to work on a new home.

In the village of Abed Rabbo - a few kilometres south of Beit Hanoun on a plot next to his father’s house - Raed thought he had found refuge from the constant violence.

But he was wrong.

When I interviewed Raed earlier this week next to more rubble, this time the rubble of his own home, he was anything but sanguine, calm and confident that peace would come soon.

He was furious, distraught and very, very scared of what the future held for him and his family.

With his savings spent on a house in rubble, and little hope of seeing it rebuilt soon, and with his taxi lying mangled in a nearby bush it was not hard to understand the rage and confusion.

He said he has already given up on his children’s education.

“How to send them to school? How? My daughter was the first in her class and first for all of north Gaza. But I have told her forget it - she cannot be a doctor now.”

He reached in to his pocket and pulled out a single key on a simple key-ring.

“This is all what we have now, this is all I can give her - our house over there,” he said, waving the key angrily and pointing east in to Israel, towards another home his family had to leave more than 60 years ago, as conflict erupted when the state of Israel was created in 1948.

Photo credit: REUTERS/Jerry Lampen

Who remembers the Google Wars website that was doing the viral rounds a few years back – a mildly amusing, non-scientific snapshot of the search-driven, internet world we live in?

It lives on at www.googlebattle.com where you can enter two search terms, say ‘Lennon vs. McCartney’ or ‘Left vs. Right’, and let the internet pick a winner by the number of search hits each word gets.

As we reported here – the virtual world has become a real battleground in the ongoing Gaza conflict – with all sides deploying significant resources.

For Israel – where hasbara or PR has often been frowned upon as unnecessary pandering to international opinion that never turns in Israel’s favour anyway – the second Lebanon war underlined the need for a coherent media and PR strategy coordinated at the centre of government.

The post-mortem of the month-long war with Hezbollah in 2006 - known as the Winograd Commission - recommended a centralised approach to hasbara to avoid spokesmen from different ministries, the army or the police telling different or conflicting stories to a voracious local and international media.

Notwithstanding the fact that the head of the new National Information Directorate did not make it to a scheduled interview with our reporter on the story above  – as my colleague Dan Williams reported here the strategy certainly seems to be working for domestic consumption.

Sources inside the Israeli government have said they are generally happy with the way the strategy has worked internationally as well despite growing international calls for a ceasefire and increasingly angry protests around the world.

The media strategy has been backed up by zero tolerance within the military and security establishment for anyone going “off message” - field commanders or political insiders who seemed to relish leaking tid-bits to their favoured reporters in 2006 are now keeping mum.

And while the virtual media war has raged – with pro-Palestinian websites like electronicintifada.net or Hamas’ own website http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/ ratcheting up the rhetoric alongside their Israeli foes – many in the traditional media (or dare I say MSM) complain that they have been totally defeated by Israel’s media strategy which has prevented them from entering Gaza or a ‘closed military zone’ neighbouring Gaza.

The world’s press has been herded on to a hill-top 2 kilometres from the Gaza Strip - where Israeli political and military spokespeople wander among the satellite trucks and live positions ‘briefing’ journalists with the official view of what’s going on inside Gaza.

As much as the protagonists have been duking it out in the virtual world - online media now has the clout to shape the way war stories are told and delivered.

The most surreal example of this is probably Joe the Plumber - yes, that Joe the Plumber of US election campaign fame - who has been engaged by pro-Israeli US website Pajamas Media to file reports from Israeli towns under Hamas rocket fire.

Joe’s basic premise seems to be that the media is inherently biased against Israel and journalists have no business being in the war zone anyway.

While you might not agree with his point-of-view - Joe is an example of the sort of do-it-yourself journalism with a strong voice that has been empowered by the Internet.

Read these two accounts - one from my colleague Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza and this one from another Gaza journalist - and I think you’ll agree that reporting from inside a warzone is important, journalists should be there and the combatants should facilitate rather than threaten this effort.

And by the way - in case you were wondering - a GoogleBattle between Israel and Palestine gives Israel a decisive victory. IDF vs. Hamas, though, has Hamas edging it.

PHOTO CREDITS

Photgraphers take pictures of Israeli tanks. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

Massive explosion in southern Gaza town of Rafah. REUTERS/Ibrahim abu-Mustafa

When world leaders meet in Washington to tackle the global financial crisis, Africa will be represented only by South Africa.

African officials meeting in Tunis this week to discuss the impact of the crisis argued that the continent needed better representation, given the effects that the turmoil is having in Africa as well as the continent’s growing financial importance. The complaint could apply equally to other developing countries.

The global crisis has come just as many African economies were turning a corner, buoyed by improvements in governance, technological change, debt relief, higher prices for their exports as well as inflows of funds from Asia and from Western investors seeking higher yields.

Many African countries have spent decades gearing economic policies to attract more private capital and dispel a reputation as unreliable investment destinations.

But turmoil on world markets has cut the supply of money as the world's biggest banks shift funds from new projects to shoring up balance sheets, leaving African governments wondering how their infrastructure will get built.

African officials were dismayed not to have a bigger voice at the summit in Washington.

"Africa ... was not associated even slightly with the preparation when it's a question of deciding the future of the world to which this continent belongs, in fact and by right," said Jean Ping, head of the African Union's executive Commission.

Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has sworn in two vice-presidents ahead of talks on power-sharing. He has also allocated important ministries to his ZANU-PF parties.

It’s a familiar pattern.

Mugabe imposes his will and MorganTsvangirai’s opposition cries foul.

Will former South African President Thabo Mbeki be able to mediate a breakthrough? After being ousted as president by his ANC party, he might not be so confident to be seen walking hand in hand with Mugabe at the airport as he has in the past.

As every twist and turn in the talks is analysed, the word endangered is increasingly used. Endangered talks.

But what about ordinary Zimbabweans? They seem more endangered every time the formation of a cabinet is delayed by accusations flying from one side to another.

Will inflational jump to astronomical levels again? Yes. Will food shortages worsen, probably.  Will Zimbabweans see their country on its feet again? It is not likely to be soon.

The words of Western leaders have long been ineffective and in any case, they have their own financial collapse to worry about right now. African countries appear no more inclined to take action than before.

In the meantime, it seems Mugabe is directing the show again.

How long can this go on?

Ministers and officials from more than 100 countries, as well as representatives of multilateral development and financial agencies, are meeting in Accra, Ghana this week (Sept. 2-4) to discuss ways of making development aid more effective. 

At its best, development aid from rich countries to help the world’s most needy can really touch the poor, giving them the means and the know-how to transform their lives and future in self-sustaining projects that profitably plug their labour and activities into the globalised world.

A project I visited in Senegal is helping Senegalese peasant farmers to become international exporters of melons.

But horror stories abound in the international aid community about wasteful proliferation, confusion and overlap of aid projects — the so-called “Tower of Babel” syndrome in which aid projects sometimes go ahead without the full collaboration of host governments and may even compete with each other.

If badly conceived and applied, aid projects can squander hundreds of millions of aid dollars in costly “white elephants” that end up providing uncontrolled funds and expensive SUVs to a handful of corrupt officials, while leaving the intended recipients as poor as they were before. 

President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, the African country which has received one of the highest levels of aid per capita on the continent since independence, has criticised some aid NGOs as being “greedy gobblers of aid resources, absorbing the best part of this through all kinds of schemes, in administration, travel and luxury hotel costs for so-called experts — rather than spending on actions”.  He recommends innovative aid initiatives that “help people to stand up”.

Some might ask what Senegal really has to show for this aid influx over the years, when we see an exodus of many young Senegalese risking their lives every year in rickety, open boats to try to reach Europe to seek a better life.

Many economists believe the stress should very much be put on trade rather than aid.

What do you think a “good” aid project should consist of? Do you know any examples of failed aid projects and why do you think they failed? What changes should be made in the way the rich world delivers aid to the poor?