Somalia’s Federal government has said it is planning to move away from ‘’over-reliance’’ on foreign aid as the country continues to recover from the over two decades of civil war.
After attending a meeting with officials from the International development Bank on ways to rebuild the country’s economy structure held in neighbouring Kenya, Minister of Finance Mohamed Aden Fargeti stressed that the government will work on ways to stop relying the assistance received from international donors.
‘’We asked them to help us on rebuilding on our economy so that we can stop relying on foreign aid… for now we want to rebuild our economy infrastructure so that we can stop being dependent on foreign assistance,’’ he told journalists in Mogadishu.
Since the collapse of the central government in 1991, Somalia has been one of the largest recipients of foreign aid.
Foreign aid is supposed to transfer resources and know-how from richer countries in order to accelerate social and economic development in poorer countries like Somalia. Unfortunately, foreign aid to Somalia has not produced the expected results. The reasons range from lack of congruency between the objectives of the donors and those of successive Somali governments to a disabling incompetence of those carrying out the projects.
Much of Africa countries rely on foreign aid, despite economic growth in parts of the continent significantly outpacing the global average.
Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.
Horseed Media
Somalia planning to stop relying on foreign aid
Published: October 1, 2015
