Last summer, Acton’s PovertyCure team traveled to Ghana to meet with its economists and entrepreneurs — the men and women who are helping the country develop. It just so happens that they also met briefly with Peter Cardinal Turkson, president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice and co-author of the note released yesterday that has stirred up a global controversy.
Cardinal Turkson, a native of Ghana, calls for the establishment of a central world bank in his note to the G-20, published in anticipation of next month’s summit in Cannes. Drawing from the first world’s obligation in solidarity to the developing world, he says:
Specific attention should be paid to the reform of the international monetary system and, in particular, the commitment to create some form of global monetary management, something that is already implicit in the Statues of the International Monetary Fund. It is obvious that to some extent this is equivalent to putting the existing exchange systems up for discussion in order to find effective means of coordination and supervision. This process must also involve the emerging and developing countries in defining the stages of a gradual adaptation of the existing instruments.
On that trip to Ghana, PovertyCure sat down for an interview with entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse, a Ghanaian software developer who writes programs that can handle frequent power outages and primitive technology. (“Everybody builds Rolls Royces, but we’re in Africa; we build Land Rovers,” he explains.) His experience with a heavily nationalized economy that is dependent on foreign aid has taught him much:
I have never heard of a country that developed on aid. If you have heard of one, let me know! I know about countries that developed on trade, and innovation, and business. I don’t know of any country that got so much aid that it suddenly became a first world country. I have never heard of such a country.
Chinery-Hesse has plenty of experience with engines of economic progress created by well-meaning Western nations:
You cannot imagine how petty the political parties could get [in Ghana]… and they can do this because they are not depending on tax revenue. They are more interested in a smile on the World Bank country director’s face than the success of my business.
A truly human program of development must take into account the fallen nature of developing countries’ rulers — they’re human too, after all. The World Bank is disruptive enough as it is: ask Herman Chinery-Hesse whether Ghana would improve if we merged it into a behemoth financial overlord.
