The Malawi example shows that there is a way out of extreme rural poverty, and that way is more food from the farmers’ own fields and work. Move ten per cent of the overall financial assistance to the poorest farmers and the first step will be taken. The rest follows by itself.

Malawi is not much different from other African countries when it comes to the situation of the poor famers. In all of Africa, there are 50 to 100 million poor farming households, many suffering from hunger for one or more months per year. Their overall productivity is far lower than necessary. If USD 50 per family were directed to the poorest farmers in Africa, the extreme poverty might be eradicated. The cost would be lower than the Swedish development budget.

If the worst poverty can be avoided by targeting a fraction of the development assistance funds directly to these farmers – then why is this not a mainstream strategy for governments and donors?

It would be unjust and cowardly not to try. How can the development assistance from Sweden and other Nordic countries be re-directed? Are we seriously interested in helping the very poorest people?

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Every year around 850-1000 billion US$ disappears from developing countries, ending up in tax havens or rich countries. The main part of this is driven by multinational companies seeking to evade tax where they operate.

The sum that leaves developing countries each year as unreported financial outflows called illicit capital flight amounts to ten times the annual global aid flows, and twice the debt service developing countries pay each year. Capital flight from African countries represents a higher burden than in other regions.

Illicit capital flight is enabled by a curtain of secrecy that needs to be lifted. Development organisations and academics in Africa and Europe agree on the measures needed at international level, for example mandatory exchange of information between tax authorities, and sanctions imposed on tax havens that do not cooperate.

The stunning volume of illicit capital flows provide the solution to the fiscal crisis as well as poverty eradication and improved standards of living in Africa. However tax evasion is a part of a wider governance problem in the world today and to simply address illicit financial flows is not enough.

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The issue for much of Africa is not the volume of water it can access, but its uneven distribution across the continent. Alongside the Middle East, the drylands of North Africa, the Sahel and the Horn of Africa face the challenge of balancing declining resources with increased consumption borne from rapid population growth.

Water scarcity in North Africa and the Middle East is at the root of the region’s uprisings. In the coming years, it will be the source of further social unrest across North and sub-Saharan Africa.

Human dignity has been widely acknowledged as the engine for the Arab Spring. There is broad consensus that the right to have a voice as well as a more equitable stake in the future of a nation have been significant factors. Dignity also includes more prosaic notions, such as having access to basic staple foodstuffs and to water, both to drink and for sanitation purposes.

Given the challenges it faces, a regional water strategy stretching across northern Africa and the Middle East is no longer an option; with unprecedented levels of water stress, it is a necessity if it is to avoid further social and economic crisis in the coming years.

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Financing the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) remains a major challenge. It is becoming clear that Official Development Assistance from donor countries will not be sufficient to fill the existing finance gap.

A new OECD report bring the topics of MDGs and domestic resource mobilisation together, reminding us that underlying many of the problems faced in developing countries is the need for more effective states and improved tax systems. However, it may oversimplify the complexity of raising additional resources through taxation.

The institutional implications of tax policy and tax policy reform are fundamental for determining how successful a country is in raising revenues. How the revenues are collected, the institutional relations around tax policy design and its implementation can impact on growth through its influence on private sector behaviour. These are by no means simple issues to resolve.

The relation between taxation and the financing of the MDGs really needs to take account of where tax revenues actually come from and how they are collected. Another major factor to take into consideration is the loss of revenues due to the huge illicit capital flight.

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The World Bank has recently amplified its rhetoric on gender equality by promoting its flagship World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development and launching its Think Equal social media campaign. Unfortunately, for billions of poor women and girls worldwide, the bank’s track record in promoting gender equality in its investments reflects an alarming gap between rhetoric and reality.

The World Bank’s agriculture investments provide one such example. Although the bank acknowledges that gender equality is critical to achieving the millennium development goal to end extreme hunger, this admission is hardly reflected in actual agriculture investments.

Most World Bank agriculture investments fail to adequately address gender inequalities, such as women’s lower education levels, discriminatory barriers to land ownership, credit, agricultural inputs like seeds and fertilisers, as well as women’s lack of decision-making and leadership roles, and unequal domestic and childcare responsibilities.

The World Bank must “act equal” and turn its gender equality rhetoric into action. If it is truly committed to ending hunger, it will promote women’s rights in all agriculture investments. It will offer grants – not loans – and ensure that each agriculture project improves the livelihoods of poor women and men, boys and girls. It will drop demands that poor countries adhere to destructive, gender-blind policy agendas that undermine rural agriculture, health and education.

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Poverty is no coincidence. It is a result of international power structures. Of poor policies and poor leadership. Of historical trends and conflicts. It is about exploitation, discrimination and oppression. Although the world’s rich and poor are becoming increasingly intertwined in a complex global economy, the goods remain unevenly distributed. The disparity between those who have most and those who have least has never been greater.

Poverty is not only about not having enough money. Poverty is about armed conflicts and wars that make it impossible to run a business, visit the doctor or send the children to school because the road there is mined. The majority of out-of school children live in war torn areas. Foreign investors who are vital to economic growth flee from conflict areas.

Poverty is about politics, and we politicians need to create political solutions to the underlying causes of poverty, something that is even more difficult than providing enough money.

We are coming close to the deadline for the Milennium Development Goals, in 2015. We must do anything possible to reach them. But we must be careful not to fool ourselves into believing that the MDGs can be reached by development aid alone. The wider politics of poverty must be lifted to the top of the international agenda, along with the three factors most critical to development: climate, conflict and capital.

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Despite the rapid economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa during the last decade, progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDG)―and poverty reduction in general―remains slow and insufficient.

This is the worrying message from a recent progress report on the Millennium Development Goals published by four international organizations: UNDP, UNECA, AU and AfDB, contradicting their own messages from earlier years.

Their analysis points to the need to take inequalities more seriously, and to increase the focus on social protection. They show that in cases when various social protection schemes have been put in place by African governments, the MDG results have been promising.

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China has continued to steadily increase its footprint in Africa especially through infrastructure development ventures. The opportunities uncovered by the Chinese firms in Africa are almost unbelievable given the rapid growth-–the opportunities are pretty much seized with minimum or no competition.

The collective value drawn by the Chinese companies and government goes way beyond monetary gains. We are not only transferring large sums of money in tunes of Billions to Beijing but we have also extended them a platform to grow their businesses in the region.

Countries do not become home to global companies by mere chance, rather it’s by identifying small companies with potential to grow and creating the supporting structures and environment for them to succeed in the home country first before they can compete in the global markets.

Generally, such strategic miscalculations could only mean that Africa may still have a fairly long way to go before we can realize real development.

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The topic of the 2012 World Development Report on Gender Equality and Development is important and marks a serious attempt to tackle gender inequalities that plague so many aspects of development in areas of health, education, political and economic participation. However, the report ultimately fails to see gender equality as an ‘end’ as well as a ‘means’.

The report hardly mentions the important role played by women’s organizations, and activists. Women’s and men’s involvement and participation in civil society is crucial for putting many gender inequalities on the policy agenda.

As my research findings from Sudan suggest, goal conflicts often occur concerning gender equality; for example one cannot presume that an inclusion of women in decision-making position will automatically put gender disparities in areas of health and education on the political agenda.

Gender equality requires a fundamental change in power structures in society. These changes cannot be reduced to smart economics.

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Do China (and India) provide alternative developmental models for Africa or is the growing influence of the two Asian superpowers nothing but a new era of economic dependency for Africa? Can any pattern be observed in the steadily increasing influence of Chinese companies in Africa?

How can we make sense of China’s effort to improve its image in Africa? Is this linked to how political implications tend to become increasingly more important in China-Africa relations? Was China early in realising that Africa had other potentials than just being a continent for political influence and armed conflicts and human catastrophes with subsequent need for humanitarian interventions? Maybe China in a cynical manner was early in realising the new economic potentials of the continent?

Chinese investments and foreign policy apparatus tend to ignore competitive multi-party politics and observance of human rights. And the last aspect is not least appealing to the nomenklaturas of Africa’s dominant party states, which are fascinated by the Chinese model of development with rapid growth through combined state-capital efforts within a corporative system.

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