Latest News

Tony Blair speaks to See Africa Differently about how the '21st century can be Africa's century'

Tony Blair recently spoke with the See Africa Differently team about his optimism for the continent, what he hopes to achieve at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan and what he thinks of the campaign to portray the modern, progressive Africa. 

Read excerpts from the interview below and read it in its entirety here. 

Q: The same polling found that 52% believe that Africa is "a long term charity case." Does this need to be the case? How can we shift perceptions?

Tony Blair: This doesn’t need to be the case, far from it. I firmly believe that Africa can be free of dependence on aid within a generation. Now that’s an ambitious goal, but it’s also an achievable goal. Achievable, if we adopt the right thinking and if leaders in both the developed and developing world can find the political will.

And, by the way, that’s what I believe the international community should commit to when political leaders gather in Busan, South Korea at the end of November to discuss aid effectiveness.

The perception of Africa as a long term charity case is wrong and it’s up to the aid community and, more importantly, Africans themselves, to counter this perception with the increasing reality of a growing Africa. That is why it is important to demonstrate that the aid community is still thinking, innovating and evolving.

We need to demonstrate the achievements that have been made and tell the stories of progress. Nearly all the world’s fastest growing economies are in Africa, apart from China and India. Globally, aid dependency fell by an average of one third in the poorest countries. In Rwanda the portion of its budget that comes from aid has nearly halved because they have been able to raise that in tax revenue. In the 1980s there were three truly free elections in Sub Saharan Africa, in the last decade there were 25.

Achievements like this are becoming increasingly hard to ignore and we have to help make them impossible to ignore.

Q: How and why should we progress the traditional 'us helping them' view of aid to one of African countries helping themselves and promote Africa to future business investors in the younger generation?

Tony Blair: In many countries this change is already occurring. There is a real sense of possibility and determination amongst the African leaders devoted to self-reliance and ending their reliance on aid.

Practically, there are clear steps the international community can take to support this. First, the only long term method of escaping from poverty is to grow Africa's private sector because businesses create jobs and jobs bring prosperity. African leaders have a responsibility to attract high quality, sustainable investment the rich world needs to support this by opening up markets and removing trade barriers.

Second, we should support African governments to build their capacity to deliver for their citizens. This issue of governance, how to get things done for the people, is the biggest single challenge I see for governments, not just in Africa, but the world over. That is why I set up the Africa Governance Initiative (AGI), to support leaders and to help them build their systems so they can implement their development plans and tackle poverty.

Third, we need to deliver aid in a way that strengthens African governments – with them in the driving seat, using local systems. This is a commitment the international community made in Paris in 2005 but it’s not been delivered yet. The message I’m taking to Busan, when the world gathers to discuss aid effectiveness is that the rich world needs to practically deliver on this commitment to country ownership because that’s the best way to help countries get on their own two feet and eliminate aid dependence.