Altered States - The Real World

To listen to today's Parliament, and more especially the Senate, you would get the unfiltered opinion that Africa remains the great Lost Continent. As if admitting this defeat, the Conservative government has cut much of its aid to 8 African nations, causing a number of ambassadors from those countries to state publicly that they feel "abandoned." In a major Senate report of two years ago, Africa was continually portrayed as a place of deep corruption, ineffective aid and lost causes, and subsequently caused many MPs and Senators to question why we are there at all.Except that the perennial pessimists are wrong. Many international commentators now feel that the continent is better positioned for prosperity and healing than at any other time since the independence movements of the 1960s. In a full assault on the conventional wisdom that seems deeply rooted in Ottawa today, numerous economists and  international development observers are now pointing to many of the successes which came from the foreign aid disbursements of the last 20 years.Once again, Geoffrey York has led the way in our understanding of issues like this by penning an insightful article on the good news emanating from Africa (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/africa-chronicle/). He points out, for example that the child mortality rate, which was 229 per 1,000 births in 1970, has now fallen to 146 in 2007. Since 1990, the child mortality rate has dropped by 40 per cent or more in countries such as Ethiopia, Malawi, Niger and Eritrea. He adds that there are 30 democracies in Africa at present, compared to just 5 at the end of the Cold War, and that where there were once 13 civil wars troubling the continent in the 1990s, today that number is reduced to 3.Commenting on the state of education, he reminds us that primary school enrollment is up by almost 20%, and that adult literacy has jumped from 27% to 62% in those years when the skeptics were stating the foreign aid was a useless exercise.Perhaps most heartening of all have been the improvements in health. Measles deaths have dropped by 89 per cent in the current decade, mostly because of higher levels of immunization. And in countries like Rwanda and Ethiopia, malaria deaths have decreased by as much as 66%. That most ravaging of all African challenges - AIDS - has also yielded some clear success stories. Several countries have significantly reduced their AIDS prevalence rates. More than two million people are receiving AIDS treatment today, compared with just 10,000 people in 2001.Not all of these improvements  have come from foreign aid, it's true. But most have, and that is a story that needs to be told. Ironically, much of this success was occurring at the time of the great negativity on Africa running through the House of Commons, the Senate, and eventually through much of the country. How was it missed? Was it, in fact, ignored? And with such measurable success, how could CIDA possibly make the decision to pull out its long-term development funds from many of the very countries that were doing what we asked.If more nations now do what Canada has recently done by pulling the plug on the continent's more progressive future, then all that has been gained will be lost. For decades, Africa summoned great imagination, effort and policy out of the Canadian political establishment; we invested because we believed things would improve. But now we have abandoned the real world and created an altered state that demeans Canada as much as Africa. Geoffrey York has done us a great service, as have all the development workers in Africa from around the world. How could we forego our compassionate imagination just at the time when it was seeing results? Don't fall for the false world being created by the naysayers in Ottawa.