The farmers of western Niger normally spend the first few months of every year filling their mud-brick storage bins with grain. But last November's harvest was a bad one, and many of the bins this year are only half-filled or empty. "It's not normal," says Amadou Salou, a farmer in the town of Male Haoussa, a few hours' drive north of the capital, Niamey. Sheltering under a tree from the scorching mid-day sun with other village elders, Salou sets out the equation. "We have too many mouths to feed and not enough food," he says. Despite the nearby emergency feeding center that treats the hungriest, two infants died last year. This season, Salou fears they may lose more.

A year after the leaders of the world's richest nations gathered in Scotland to work out a deal to help Africa, the results are still in the balance. The deal — a doubling of aid for the continent by 2010 and debt cancellation for eligible, heavily indebted poor countries, most of them African — was hailed as a breakthrough. For a brief moment, to the sounds of a global rock concert and British

404 Not Found

---

nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu) Prime Minister Tony Blair's optimism, the world's focus was on Africa and the hope was that the continent was on the verge of turning itself around. But as the problems of Niger show, Africa's struggles did not miraculously vanish.

Drought and food shortages, often exacerbated by government mismanagement, continue in Niger and its neighbors in the Horn of Africa and in parts of Southern Africa. Earlier this month James Morris, the head of the United Nations World Food Program (wfp), warned that more funding for food aid was needed in Sudan or peace II there could unravel. Oxfam complained in May that less than one-seventh of the funds the United Nations and aid groups need for Congo had been given. As the G-8 leaders prepare to gather again, skeptics are asking if their resolutions really matter on the ground.

No deal, however substantial, could reasonably have been expected to solve the problems of Africa in a year or even a decade. And change is happening. Countries such as Mozambique and Zambia have channeled the money they once spent on debt payments into their health and education systems. Rich countries spent more than $100 billion on aid last year, up from $80 billion in 2004 — though more than 80% of that increase was poured into reconstruction efforts and debt relief in Iraq.

There is also change in the way aid is being financed and delivered, not just because of last year's G-8 deal, but also because the focus on Africa and aid delivery in the run-up to the G-8 summit encouraged some U.N. agencies and ngos to rethink their business. "We can do it better," says Hilary Benn, Britain's Secretary of State for International Development and one of the leading figures in the debate about aid delivery. "We should all ask ourselves the question: 'What is the most effective form in which we can give support?'"

ngos have long struggled to get the balance right between development and emergency aid. As total foreign aid to the developing world has declined over the past two decades, it is long-term projects that have suffered most. "We risk getting into a pernicious cycle where money for long-term recovery is being diverted to fund emergency relief," says head of Oxfam in East Africa, Paul Smith-Lomas. "If long-term projects are raided every time we face a crisis, the region will never progress."

The U.N. has come up with an answer, a retooled version of a 15-year-old emergency relief reserve, now called the Central Emergency Response Fund (cerf). Until a few months ago, U.N. agencies had to apply for funding allocation on a case-by-case basis, a bureaucratic process that often slowed the delivery of vital aid until starving kids filled television screens. (Benn likens it to a fire service forced to pass around a hat before responding to an alarm.) From this year, the cerf can be accessed within three days, most of the money is to be given as grants and not loans, and the total pot, to be replenished regularly, should grow tenfold to $500 million.

Aid groups are coming up with inventive alternatives to traditional aid delivery too. In March, the wfp took out an insurance policy against extreme drought during Ethiopia's agricultural season this year. The deal, which the agency says is the world's first humanitarian insurance policy, is based upon a calibrated index of rainfall gathered from 26 weather stations across Ethiopia. If rainfall is significantly below historic averages, French insurance giant AXA Re will pay out $7 million, money that the wfp will then use to help the farmers whose crops will inevitably fail. Richard Wilcox, the wfp's director of business planning, says that the organization is already a type of insurer itself, and that insuring against drought is simply passing on the risk. "Having funding ready to make payouts changes the agency-donor-beneficiary dynamic considerably," he says.

In another shift, there is growing interest in giving needy people cash or vouchers rather than food. Food crises often happen even when there is food available in the local markets — but no means to buy it. Subsistence farmers earn money by selling excess grain. If their crops fail they are left not only hungry but also broke. Foreign food aid feeds them but it hurts local traders, whose goods drop in value as the market is flooded with free food. Over the past five years, Oxfam has started to give small cash payments rather than food in countries such as Malawi and Zambia, where local markets have adequate supplies. It is a method the agency has expanded to places such as Niger where it uses a voucher-for-work scheme. That obviates the need for massive warehouses to store food, and enables the agency to give money to people before they go hungry. Such schemes are designed to save not just lives but livelihoods. "Ultimately, development is about people doing it for themselves," says Benn.

But there's a long way to go. Thanks to slower-than-expected donations, so far the new cerf has pledges and donations amounting to just over half the $500 million the U.N. wants. And the ideas are not always welcomed by jaded aid workers. When the wfp first suggested taking out an insurance policy, many of its own staff were against the idea, figuring that the money — around $1 million for this season's policy alone — would be better off being used to buy food. "For a financial person, the reason to take out a policy is clear," says Wilcox, who calls Africa's hungry wfp's "key shareholders." "But for a foreign-aid person it's quite a significant conceptual shift."

A year after Gleneagles, it is clear that more conceptual shifts are needed. Many G-8 leaders who signed on in Scotland have faced trouble getting parliamentary and popular backing at home. A White House proposal that the U.S., the biggest donor of emergency food aid, start buying food in Africa to feed starving Africans was killed by strong resistance from the U.S.'s farming and transportation lobbies. According to Oxfam's June report, no G-8 country has yet met its Gleneagles promise nor is poised to do so, and the much needed trade agreement that would open up rich world markets to developing-world farm products remains as elusive as ever.

On top of that, much of the rich world's aid is still "tied" to projects, companies and consultants from the donating country. While tied aid is not always bad, "the way aid is given is still all about vested interest," says a policy adviser for one aid group. "You can have their aid as long as you spend it on their food or their road-construction company."

In western Niger, Fati Abdou sits in an emergency-feeding center for small children administered by Islamic Relief, a British aid organization. The 37-year-old mother cradles her baby son, Awashodi, whose achingly thin body led her to walk several hours to the center. Food has become so expensive, she says, that she and other families cannot afford it. "If the parents don't have enough food they can't feed their children. That is why the children are suffering." Relieving that suffering for good, though, is much harder than just feeding the child for a few months.

• SIMON ROBINSON
• Niger struggles to survive another devastating drought