Supporting good leaders in Africa is crucial to development success and can help to make the continent the driving economic force of the 21st century, just as Asia was in the second half of the 20th century, Tony Blair said at CGD event.
Drawing on his experiences in office, the former UK prime minister said that leaders often find that they are able to devote only a fraction of their time to their stated priorities. Having top-quality aides, and support in such seemingly basic functions as scheduling, can make a big difference to a leader’s effectiveness, he said.
Blair described the work of his Africa Governance Initiative, which cosponsored the CGD event, in supporting good leaders on the continent. AGI is currently working with leaders in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. While introducing Blair, CGD president Nancy Birdsall praised him for pushing global development issues to the top of the international policy agenda.
“Throughout his time in office, and since leaving office, Tony Blair has worked to make shared global prosperity a reality,” Birdsall said. She cited three examples of these efforts: establishing the UK Department for International Development (DfID) as an independent, cabinet-level agency; advocating for international action to avert dangerous climate change; and paying special attention to Africa, including ambitious aid and debt-relief initiatives, particularly during the 2005 Gleneagles Summit.
In his opening remarks, Blair said that CGD is a “world leader in the development space.” Responding to Birdsall, he also reflected on the unique role that DfID has played in the UK.
“Actually I remember when we first set up DFID, the Department for International Development. We did set it up as an independent department, and my goodness it was,” he said, drawing laughter from a standing-room-only audience of more than 300 development policy experts and practitioners.
Blair added that while DfID’s independence sometimes rubbed other ministries the wrong way “its very independence allowed it to be innovative and groundbreaking” in ways that it would not otherwise have been.
“Aid does work,” he said. “It has brought real and profound benefits to poor people and increasingly so in recent years.”
He added, however, that “without building effective capacity, without governments capable of delivering practical things and on a path to release from dependency on aid, then aid can only ever be a palliative—vital to many, but not transformative of a nation.”
“The vision thing is often the easy part,” he said. “Where you need to get to is reasonably obvious. What is really hard is getting there and doing it. It is the nuts and bolts of policy. It is strategy. It is performance management. It is delivery. It is the right expertise in the right place. It is ministers who can focus. It is organizing and communicating it.”
Blair concluded: “I think this is an incredibly exciting time to be in the development field. There are great people, like many here today, with long experience and extraordinary commitment in this area. And there are new leaders; a new sense of purpose; new players in the NGO, charitable and private sector. All of this is creating a new sense of possibility and therefore hope. In my judgment, this could be Africa’s century. It should be. To play even a very small part in making that happen is a privilege.”
Blair founded AGI in 2007 on the principle that good governance is not just about the absence of corruption but the presence of capacity to deliver change.
AGI currently works in three countries recovering from past conflict where leaders have a clear vision for reform but where the capacity to deliver the public services such as health, education, and infrastructure remains lacking.
Additional Event Materials:
Text of Mr. Blair's Speech on African Development
Copy of the Essay by Tony Blair: “Not Just Aid: How Making Government Work Can Transform Africa.”