Dambisa Moyo discusses the impact of reducing African aid budgets.

Question: How will the Global Financial Crisis affect the aid model?

Moyo:    Well, I think there would definitely be an impact in a negative one at that, because one can envisage the situation where Westerners, Western governments who are dealing with their own crisis at home are going to be faced with shrinking budgets and needs to borrow more money quite aggressively.  So, the bailout programs sort of very familiar to Western in the United States, but also more generally in doing the countries are become a very big deal.  Two countries in particular Italy has been very public about cutting back it’s 80 budget by 50%, but also when Britain movements in the exchange rate have meant that the actual notion amount of money that they going to be giving two developing countries has shrunk.  So, these types of factors which are an artifact of the credit crisis mean that the aid model is really under threat.