This section does not set out to summarize the state of technology … merely to highlight the impressive power of modern information technology and to invite an ongoing collaborative partnership between those with an interest in data and socio-economic performance analysis and those with an understanding of what is possible with modern technology.

There is lots of it, but it is not much use. Much of the information that is available about development has an enormously high cost, but dramatically smaller value. Value destruction at its best. Why is this information not help much in making good decisions about development. Why is so much data good for economic analysis and good material for journalists, but little use in the effective management of development resources. Where is the information to drive transparency and accountability?

At a peace rally in New York in February 2003, just before the Second Gulf War, one of the banners read “One of the first casualties of war is the truth”

I have helped developing country government staff coordinate development assistance. It is not a pretty sight. On the one side there are the local people, some in positions of considerable power who want projects for their own reasons, some good and some not so good. On the other side there are donors who want projects that serve their own set of interests. A prioritization of projects to optimize the use of resources and the realization of development progress is nowhere to be found in most development coordination efforts. It should be. It can be. But not without information that is accessible to the public and accountability that goes beyond anything we are doing at the moment.

My most satisfying work was when I was a CFO working with a CEO who understood the economic dynamics of his business, and who used the financial numbers and the operations analysis that we were able to do to confirm the decisions that he had already made. He knew what the company performance had been based on past management information. He made decisions to try to make it better as soon as there was preliminary information that suggested an improvement possibility. He looked to the next set of management information to confirm that his decisions had been effective. If the information suggested something different would be better, then that would be tried. This was excellent use of management information, including the critical aspect of feedback

1. data;
2. information;
3. Intel.;
4. knowledge;
5. wisdom.

Any overview of the immense challenges facing Africa must put the HIV/Aids pandemic high on the list. Almost 30 million people living with HIV and two and half million dying from Aids each year in Africa make this a defining moment for the continent.

The Aids crisis is leaving hundreds of thousands of households headed by children as young as nine or 10 years old. Whole villages now have only the young and the aged to look out for each other's survival. And this corset-shaped demography is damaging the development prospects of most of the African continent. Deaths in Africa have now become so frequent that businesses have restricted staff to attending only the funerals of their closest family members. Orphaned children drop out of school because they cannot afford to pay the fees, and they are crowding women out of the informal economy.

The United Nations estimates that the pandemic is slowing economic growth rates by between 1 per cent and 3 per cent per year. For economies that are, for the most part, barely outpacing their population growth rates, this is a debilitating setback for their development prospects. The full effects of HIV/Aids are still spreading, and are yet to be quantified by development agencies and African governments trying to reverse the pandemic.

On the face of it, Bush's additional $3bn a year is an impressive sum. While still some billions short of the UN's estimate of $7bn a year needed to tackle the pandemic, the Bush plan will buy life-extending drugs and is intended to provide humane care to 10 million people. But this does not talk about the need for drugs and therapy and human care for around 40 million people. It just talks about 10 million people. And it assumes that Bush's words will become reality. Don't hold your breath.

But the causes of the spread of the pandemic are, like its consequences, multi-dimensional. Tackling the disease requires an approach that encompasses the full range of development policies.

HIV/Aids and other public health crises, such as malaria and TB, thrive in families and communities marred by poverty, malnutrition, economic migration and ignorance. The accelerators of disease are found in Africa's collapsing health and education infrastructures.

Donors share a responsibility for this. Millions of Africans were denied access to primary healthcare and education when the International Monetary Fund and World Bank forced their governments to charge for these basic services as part of the conditions attached to aid and debt relief. We are faced with a flawed practice of dictating from the top down how African governments should spend aid money. Bush's plan focuses narrowly on the provision of anti-Aids drugs and health education programmes rather than on a broader approach that would enable more children to attend school and remove some of the obstacles to Africa's development and poverty reduction plans. Longer-term solutions behind Aids and other crises in Africa are only going to be forthcoming when donors respond by supporting the priorities identified by progressive African governments. They must mobilise their resources behind anti-Aids and poverty reduction plans designed by Africans themselves. So far, the G8 has failed to pursue such a collaborative and mature approach.

This weekend Bush will be meeting other G8 leaders and a handful of African governments in Evian. He will clearly be pointing to the large sums of money behind his anti-Aids drive and challenging European Union countries and Japan to match it.

The G8 leaders have collectively failed to understand that it's not just the amount of money that is important but the way it is given. Both aid and debt relief often come with damaging anti-poor conditions attached, such as the IMF's insistence on privatisation. The few African leaders who have been invited to the Evian summit will be calling for a different approach. Their proposal, called a New Partnership for Africa, is based on the recognition that the era of development policies designed in Western capitals and then imposed on supplicant governments has too frequently failed the poor.

One of the African proposals is for a new approach to debt. The African leaders want the amount of debt relief to be determined by the finance necessary to achieve their poverty-reduction plans. Their calls have been echoed by citizens in all the G8 countries. Five years ago, a demonstration by 70,000 activists at the Birmingham G8 meeting put debt and development on the agenda of the summits of the world's most powerful heads of government.

Those of us who gathered for the peaceful protest in Birmingham were moved by what we saw as an issue of social justice. We argued that it is wrong that those with the least should be made to repay their debts to those who already have the most. To us, it seemed absurd that the poorest of the poor should sacrifice their own and their children's life chances in order to maintain a debt repayment regime that none of them had any voice or control in contracting.

The Jubilee 2000 Campaign mobilised millions of people around the world and forced the G8 leaders to make a dramatic response to the debt crisis. Yet for debt campaigners, the G8 promise of an end to the injustice of unpayable Third World debts remains unfulfilled. The G8 meeting in Cologne in 1999 promised $111bn of debt relief spread over 40 years. The member countries are now committing themselves to providing about a third of that amount.

The limited debt relief that has trickled through has led to higher spending in Africa on health, education and investment in agriculture. But African governments are still left short of the finance needed to meet the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goal to halve poverty by 2015. The scandal is that the money required to write off the debts of the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is, in global terms, barely significant. It has been costed at little over $6.4bn spread over five years. Compare that with the $350bn that rich countries subsidise their farmers with every year.

And the irony is that in the week before Bush's announcement on the Aids bill, the US Senate voted for deeper debt reduction that would go some way to restore the capacity of African governments to finance their own poverty reduction strategies. But the Bush team in the US Treasury effectively vetoed it. So Bush's announcement on Aids is not a watershed. Like most of the G8's approach to Africa, it is critically flawed by its belief that the donors hold the prerogative on development policy.

A radical and successful approach to Africa needs donors to co-ordinate their resources behind African-owned and agreed poverty reduction plans. The world's richest countries need to break with failed approaches of the past by supporting African strategies designed with the widest possible consensus of the people who will be implementing those plans, strategies that have been influenced by the poor, who are the intended beneficiaries.

This week will be the third time the G8 has invited progressive African governments to meet at the rich man's table. This time they must not only be heard; they must also be heeded.

Julian Filochowski is director of the aid agency Cafod