World Bank, IMF Vow Better Africa Strategy

After four decades and billions of dollars from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the nations of sub-Saharan Africa remain among the world’s poorest.

At the conclusion Saturday of an unprecedented African tour, bank and fund officials owned up to the failure of past policies and vowed to seek a new approach.

The Dar es Salaam meeting, attended by 12 leaders from eastern and southern Africa, was the penultimate stop on the first joint tour to Africa by IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler and World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn.

The lenders said they were calling an end to the era of the 1980s and ‘90s, when the IMF and World Bank were accused of imposing one-size-fits-all conditions on loans to poor countries.

And this time around, the lenders said, they would listen to suggestions by African leaders.

“We have understood that every country needs to be seen individually because the problems are different and the approaches are different,” Koehler said.

Today’s approach is for African leaders to come up with their own proposals on issues such as economic reform, education and the fight against the AIDS epidemic--perhaps the continent’s biggest crisis.

“The listening approach . . . is an admission that nobody is perfect,” said Koehler, who took the IMF job last year.

“Clearly we have also made mistakes in the past.”

While their lending spurred development in Asia and Latin America, bank and fund officials come up with only three African successes--Tanzania, Mozambique and Uganda.

Critics accuse the lending institutions of caring more about macroeconomics than social development, of investing in factories that never open and dams that remain empty, and of allowing their money to prop up corrupt regimes.

But perhaps the most stinging criticism is that they have treated Africa with contempt and failed to understand the countries they are dealing with, imposing conditions that make the poor poorer and the rich richer.

“We may be sick, we may be ailing, but sometimes the sick man knows what’s ailing him, and the doctor has to listen to him,” Kenyan Foreign Minister Bonaya Godana said.

“In the past, it’s been more a question of ‘We are the experts, we know what’s good for you,’ ” he said.