Bono Blogs on the Generosity of Americans

Bono continues his liveblogging from the UN special summit on the MDGs this week. Some excerpts from his latest entry are below. See the full post on FT.com.

The ONE campaign has two and half million members, who urge us to make the case for increased aid as a key plank in America’s new foreign policy. ONE T-shirts have been turning up in town hall meetings for 18 months now, haranguing, hassling, but ultimately endearing themselves to all the presidential campaigns. They want the world to see what America has to offer the billion people who live on less than a dollar a day - practically speaking: medicine, new seed varieties, technology, know-how; policy speaking: what should America do more of? what should America do less of?

…Anyway we’ve now met with nearly a dozen of the presidential candidates in the course of their campaigns and of the four candidates left, three have declared their positions at onevote08.org/ontherecord, if you want to check them out.

On AIDS for example, Senators Obama and McCain both cosponsored the historic $48bn US AIDS initiative this year - an effort lead by Joe Biden - who I might add also fought in the trenches for debt cancellation for the poorest of the poor when I first started down this road. So it will be interesting to find out where Governor Palin stands.

Bono: “Aid is a leg-up, not a hand-out”

Bono continues his live blogging today from UN Special Summit on the Millenium Development Goals. You can see all his posts on the FT.com Blog site.

Below are some excerpts from his blogging late last night.

Aid is a leg-up, not a hand-out

“Lots of speeches etc going on inside the UN… President Bush, President Sarkozy. We’re on the outside today, meeting activists from Africa, India and Europe to talk about holding the people on the inside accountable for their promises.
The promises in question this week are the Millennium Development Goals or MDGs….

For those of you, the many of you, questioning aid on this site, you’re not wrong to suggest that it’s not the only answer. Of course it’s not. It’s trade, it’s governance, it’s private investment. But aid is critical… ask Germany, ask Ireland. See it as a leg-up, not a hand-out.
I’m not talking about the aid of the 20th century by the way. For too many years, much aid was wasted and ended up redecorating presidential palaces instead of building hospitals. That was our corruption as well as theirs. Handing over billions of dollars to a corrupt dictator because he isn’t a Commie, knowing he will use it to suppress discontent and swell personal bank accounts - that makes you complicit. But, this is a new century, and a new understanding of aid and partnership means that we are starting to see different results.”

Read his full post here.

Bono Blogs on Meeting French President Sarkozy

Bono has been blogging today from the United Nations’s Summit on the MDG’s in NYC. The below post he wrote after meeting with the President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy. You can read his complete posts at FT.com.

Tough meeting with the Président de la République of France. He’s a tough guy. We like tough guys because they get straight down to business. They don’t waste their time or yours. The French budget is out this Friday and in it we will see if France intends continuing its leadership role on the continent of Africa. In the last few years, French aid has been falling.

My point was that as much as Africa needs French aid and the energy that Sarkozy himself provides, he/we need Africa. Why? Africa has never been so strategically important as it is now, economically and politically. Just ask…

Read the full post here.

-Virginia Simmons

Bono on this week’s United Nation’s MDG Summit

All this week, Bono and Jeffrey Sachs will be blogging for the Financial Times from the United Nation’s summit on the Millennium Development Goals.

As a precursor, the Financial Times conducted a Q & A with Bono. An excerpt is below, and the full piece is at FT.com.

AB: What is this week [and the Millennium Development Goals summit] all about?

Bono: Most of us woke up on New Year’s Day 2000 with a hangover and a hazy memory of a night of pleasant fanfare and dumb parade. However, the new millennium was also celebrated by our commitment to eight goals that would change the planet and demonstrate to the developing world how we might, through a combination of know-how and resources, partner with them in efforts to help millions out of desperate poverty. We gave ourselves 15 years, we’re halfway there. How do we measure up?

AB: What are the two or three goals you want to achieve this week?

Bono: 1. Blogging for the FT, being your roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly midtown at the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the resilience of the world’s poor while the world’s rich find out how fragile life can be.

2. Unlock €1bn of unspent European Union Common Agricultural Policy money. This year our farmers don’t qualify for it, food prices are high. African farmers desperately need it.

3. Show what’s working as well as what’s not. Bad news about Africa travels much farther than good news. There will be a historic and innovative announcement on malaria on Thursday – watch out for it. Thanks to debt relief, aid and African leadership, 29m more children are going to school.

Read the full Q & A here.