Does Africa's Future Depend on Global Financial Institutions? April 20, 2009

Hosted by American Enterprise Institute.

"The IMF is back," announced International Monetary Fund (IMF) managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the G20 summit in London. Both the IMF and the World Bank have declared that Africa is in a state of economic crisis and plan to address the continent’s development at spring meetings of the joint World Bank-IMF Development Committee and the IMF's International Monetary and Financial Committee. Preliminary discussions have yielded numerous policy proposals, such as allotting 0.7 percent of all stimulus plans to a World Bank "vulnerability fund," tripling lending to poor countries, and boosting the IMF's reserves by $1 trillion.

But are these plans, which rely on large expenditures from developed countries, viable solutions to Africa's development challenges? Will the global recession necessarily impact Africa more than the rest of the world? What risks and opportunities for economic reform does the global recession present for Africa? Does the reassertion of these international financial institutions' influence on the continent counteract the domestic and regional interventions that African countries are taking themselves to promote economic stability and growth?

Join us as we discuss these and other important questions with Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa; Nicholas Eberstadt, Henry Wendt Scholar in Political Economy at AEI; and Paul Wolfowitz, AEI visiting scholar and former World Bank president. AEI resident fellow Mauro De Lorenzo will moderate.

Official Website: http://www.aei.org/events/type.upcoming,eventID.1916,filter.all/event_detail.asp