Sub-Saharan Africa - What next?

After reading the Aid Versus Investment, The Used Clothing Trade, and the Economic Development Bulletin I have noticed several trends. First, donations become back market items. Second, since 1960 the United States and other governments have been pouring money into Africa and there has been hardly an improvement, but many problems that have gotten worse. Finally, the problem lies with a lack of responsibility: the responsibility of governments giving aid to monitor how it is being used, and a responsibility of African governments receiving the aid to use it appropriately.

In my opinion the aid money that governments pour into African countries would be best spent on anti-corruption programs, and on creating more stable governments. Like the Economic Development Bulletin article stated, the current situation is simply, "the blind leading the clueless." The aid given to coutnries needs to be monitored, otherwise the coutnries may as well not have given the aid in the first place. If there has been no improvement in the past 40 years of giving aid, and the leaders simply continue to pocket the money, then why would countries who desire to help the people of Africa, not closely monitor or instruct governments there on how best to use the aid that is given them? It just does not make sense, because you would only be supporting the corrupt leaders.

In fact, if there are corrupt leaders, why are we handing them aid anyways? Shouldn't the goal be to help African nations by helping them to establish a solid, healthy government. There is already much civil war going on in many of the coutnries, so I don't know how exactly this would work best, or how it would look, but I think that in some cases we should use the aid money to establish a new government. I feel like a random selection of 10 average African peoples from the country could form a better parliamentary government, that would actually use aid money to address peoples needs, than having politicians or war lords leading these countries.

Either way, something needs to change, and I do not think that it is wise to continue giving aid to Africa and not monitoring how they use it or helping them make wise decisions with it.