The world spends billions on aid to Africa. Where does all that aid go to? Well, a lot of it ends up on the “Road to Nowhere”:

To judge how far aid has helped Africa along the road to prosperity, just look down at the pavement or the lack of it.

The most important highway in East Africa starts at the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa. Tens of thousands of trucks every year carry food, fuel and other goods to 100 million people in east and central Africa up a bone-jarring two-lane road.

Despite millions of aid dollars spent on roads, the wear and tear is so bad that journeys take weeks. And the cost makes it cheaper to have a container of corn shipped from Iowa than to truck it 500 miles to western Kenya.
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“Africans do not want to be viewed as a charity case,” adds Okonjo-Iweala, a World Bank managing director. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of Africans are people who are getting on with their own lives. All they are asking for is….a set of tools.”

Roads are the lifeblood of an economy, the delivery system for agriculture, mining, tourism and other mainstays of African industry. But roads in Africa are few and bad. When foreign companies calculate the price of doing business on the continent, they look at figures like the cost of transportation and decide to go somewhere else.

“No one would ever have 100 million people in the rich world along a broken-down, two-lane, undivided road as we do here,” said leading economist Jeffrey Sachs about Nairobi. “If the donors were thinking about what would really provide development, it’s a proper, divided highway on which truck traffic could go.”

Truth is, they did think of it and almost built it 40 years ago. But today, the east-west Trans-African Highway exists only on maps. On the ground, it turns into a muddy footpath in the jungles of eastern Congo.

In conversations with some colleagues and a few so-called friends, I’ve often been the subject of strong criticism for my view that aid money would be better spent on infrastructure and institutions that facilitated the free flow of business and international trade as opposed to food shipments. It’s hard for non-supply chain/logistics people to understand that if you don’t have the necessary infrastructure in place it doesn’t matter how much you throw at the system, it simply isn’t going to move well and all your money is going to be eaten up in logistics costs. It’s no different than looking at international trade - countries with poor infrastructure make trade difficult and expensive. It’s no different with aid logistics. And I think this article is accurate in stating that what most Africans want is not a handout, but simply the means to stand on their own two feet and support themselves. This guy gets it. Although to get Africa’s infrastructure off the ground will take more than micro-credits the concept is still there.

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