Tony Blair Photo Credit Kevin Coombs/REUTERS

As originally seen at The Guardian.

Tony Blair makes only rare public appearances in Britain these days and his speech on aid effectiveness today was billed as his first to a domestic audience since he left Downing Street more than four years ago.

Fittingly, the former prime minister espouses a Third Way between those who believe the imperative is for rich donor countries to keep ponying up the cash they promised at Gleneagles in 2005 and those who think financial assistance to poor nations increases dependency and is a waste of money at a time when governments in the West are cutting public spending.

Blair says the "Dead Aid" lobby is wrong when it says aid doesn't work. He pointed today to the tenfold increase in the availability of antiretroviral drugs in the past decade, the halving of deaths from measles and the sharp decrease in cases of malaria as evidence of the benefits of donor assistance. "Aid works for sure", he said, "particularly when it comes to disease, famine and mitigating the effects of poverty."

On the other hand, he says it would be unwise to dismiss the Dead Aid critique out of hand at a time when developed-country governments are counting the pennies. So the Third Way approach goes like this. Western donors should continue to provide aid, but there should also be a responsibility on leaders of African nations to ensure that the money is well spent. The idea should be to help reformist governments put in place the building blocks of development; functioning health and education systems, power systems, sanitation and transport networks, then leave developing countries to get on with it. "The purpose is to help countries stand on their own feet", Blair said. "The purpose is to use aid to end aid". Blair has been saying this consistently since the time of the 2005 Gleneagles summit, in which the G8 committed itself to debt relief, freer trade and a doubling of aid as part of a grand bargain with African leaders, who would commit themselves to improved governance in return.

Finish reading the blog at The Guardian.