Millions of people in Africa, and elsewhere around the world, depend on financial support from wealthy governments, the United Nations, and private organizations to provide basic necessities they cannot afford such as clean water, health care, textbooks and food. In the best cases, this assistance helps communities become more independent — so that in the long run, they won’t need to rely on handouts. Too often, though, development assistance has been wasted, ineffective or given for the wrong reasons. As a result, “aid” has become a dirty word to some people. But effective aid, or development assistance, is one of the best investments we can make — in the lives of others and in our own future. We can do it better and we must do more of it.

Back in 1970, wealthy nations agreed that 0.7% of the money their countries made in a year (or Gross National Product — GNP) would be a fair amount to share with poor countries. That doesn’t sound like very much, but the richest nations aren’t even halfway to that target. Overall, they gave just 0.25% of national wealth for development assistance in 2004. Only five countries have reached the 0.7% target — Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. The U.S., the world’s richest country, gives the smallest percentage of its wealth, 0.16%, to poor countries.

So what is development assistance trying to achieve? Is it just a bottomless pit? No. In 2000, world leaders committed to a set of concrete ‘Millennium Development Goals’ for all poorer countries — halving poverty, fighting AIDS, giving all children the chance to go to school and every person access to clean drinking water, among other things. But two-thirds of the poorest countries which are off-track and very unlikely to meet these goals are in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The United Nations has estimated that Africa will need more than twice what it receives today in development assistance by 2010 in order to reach these goals. But simply pouring more money in is not the answer. In order to truly help Africa—and in order to make sure taxpayers’ money is not wasted—the quality of development assistance has to be improved as the quantity goes up. For example, much of the money given by rich countries to poor countries is actually ‘tied’ to the interests of rich government. This means that poor countries have to spend a portion of the money buying goods and services from the country that gave it, rather than giving them the option to shop around for the best value for money. This reduces the quality of much foreign aid considerably. One World Bank survey estimated that ‘tied’ aid was 20% less effective than untied aid. Studies also show that aid is also more effective if it is “country-owned”. This means that the recipient countries should be deciding how to spend the money for themselves after consulting with their citizens, especially the poorest groups.

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