Should the U.S. Government Substanittially Increase its help to Sub-Sahran Africa

I identify the crux of your argument as the following statement. There are basically two ideas here - First that money is not being spent as it should be, and second that the budget ceilings of the "Big 3" should be raised. "...a vast majority of this money is not spent on the people as it should be. My plans to solve this problem are as follows and they are that I think we should expand the budget ceilings of loans from the big 3 which are the "World Bank", the "International Monetary Fund", and the "U.S. Government of Foreign Aid/ U.S. Treasury, this would allow more money to flow into SSA." First, your analysis of the end result of the money is correct - namely that it is NOT being spent on the people it should be. However, this is not a result of lack of infrastructure like roads and telecommunications. Granted, there is a lot of money being wasted through those avenues, but the vast majority of the money is wasted because of the loan conditions the World Bank and IMF attach to their money. Second - the notion that the budget caps on US expenditures via the WB, IMF, and USFGA/USTD should be expanded is completely and unilaterally incorrect. They should be lowered or eliminated. Here's why: 1. As we agreed above, the money is not getting where it needs to go - this is the fault of the people in charge at the WB, IMF, and USFGA/USTD that think a Western philosophy is the solution in Africa. They favor top-down solution, while what's needed is a bottom-up solution. 2. Historically, the amount of aid to Africa from the US has been doubled once before - and conditions actually got WORSE. What happened was that there was more money for the governments of these SSA countries to misuse on things like their military or improving the conditions and benefits of a small elite few in power. 3. The conditions attached to these loans retard development, not advance it. Structural Adjustment Policies (SAP's - yes... ironic) often involve cutting spending on social programs and opening markets to free trade. Obviously, cutting spending on social programs reduces the amount of health care available to the people. This also drives down the wages of government-employed doctors. Opening markets to free trade is all well and good, as long as you aren't doing things like exporting cotton and importing shirts. Unfortunately, many SSA countries are doing just that - exporting raw materials and importing finished products. My solutions are as follows (I actually already had a debate on this, so I'm using my solutions from there...) 1) Loan money to individuals - mostly WOMEN. Women are more likely to use capital for activities like education, improvement of the community, and farming. Men, on the other hand, are most likely to invest the money in some way to try to make MORE money, such as a business or market investment. In an impoverished economy, these ventures usually fail. 2) Educating the populace is important, but it is being done backwards at the moment. Many new schools are being built, but the students in them are mostly male. This isn't a case of a 60/40 split - it's more like 80/20 or worse. Educating the female population does two things - first, it creates a larger educated workforce, and second, it DECREASES the fertility rate of a country. The education of women can reduce the fertility rate (children per woman) by 2/3 or more. This controls population growth and also reduces the workload of the woman in the family (the woman is traditionally the homebuilder - the man is working in a city much of the time and sending money back). 3) Incentives should be given to companies that move factories and other businesses to the developing world with the EXPLICIT PURPOSE of returning portions of their product to the country. This could be in the form of reduced tariffs on the goods that were exported. Doing this allows for cotton from one country to be processed in a textile factory IN THAT COUNTRY and returned to the market in the country. This is the basis for economic independence. To reiterate - the IMF and World Bank have no business providing financial aid to impoverished governments - The Grameen Bank's microfinance model is much better - Western SAP's have no business telling developing countries how to develop - A Bottom --> Up approach is needed.