Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I hope we will have an opportunity to discuss the amendments in greater detail. This is in the context of the relationship with the International Finance Corporation which is a sister organisation of the World Bank. I recommend the Minister of State read some of the recent statements by Dr. Kim, the president of the World Bank who comes from South Korea, in which he points to the error in the approach of organisations such as the World Bank which over many decades has just really been about big dams and other very large infrastructural projects, which in many cases did not particularly benefit local communities and may have moved them off their lands in parts of Asia and Africa.

Dr. Kim has suggested we should now have a focus on investment in people, particularly in education and in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Ireland's commitment to the African Development Bank is relatively modest and will take place over a lengthy period. As a new contributor to the bank, we need to ensure that our contribution reflects this welcome change of heart on behalf of institutions such as the World Bank, which, of course, in Africa and Asia is very influential in the projects that get the international funding.

The proposed concentration on investment in people, education and the Millennium Development Goals would mean that post Ireland joining the African Development Bank the focus would be more people centred than simply, as we have very often seen, very rich western bidders for contracts walking away with most of the money spent in Africa and local people benefiting very little. Among these local people I include women and children who by and large are the people who suffer most from poverty in Africa.

Women, by and large, are the people responsible for carrying out the bulk of subsistence farming. In the context of farmers, women, by and large, are the small business people who are not necessarily part of the modern money economy. However, many parts of Africa are now advancing. I welcome that EU countries generally are beginning to have a fresher and deeper relationship with African countries because Africa is a vibrant continent with a huge population. The millennium development goals have helped reduce infant mortality, increase girls' access to education and generally widened the scope of third level education.

In terms of Ireland's participation in the African Development Bank, if we can be assured that it will meet the millennium development goals requirements, I would have no difficulty in supporting it. However, if this is about mostly men driving around in massive Land Rovers to very poor parts of Africa and spending working people's tax payments in Europe and the rest of the world in a way that simply aggrandises the people in certain types of development agencies and leaves little or nothing behind, I will not welcome it.

It will be for the Minister, and this Government, to answer how they propose to address that because as a country we spend well over €0.5 billion every year on development in our contributions. The African Development Bank commitment will be approximately an extra €8 million per year over the coming period. That is not a major sum in the scale of things but it is important that our development programme should be a quality programme aimed at enhancing the lives of the people who are very poor, particularly women and children, but also enhancing the capacity of African countries across the continent to make provision in a full way for their own people and lead to that period which many African writers and intellectuals have spoken and written about of an African renaissance that we would see in this decade.

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