More than 600 million of the world's poorest people live in Africa often in crowded cities, or in small villages lacking health clinics or schools. Unlike every other region in the world, the poverty here worsens each year.

So when some of the world's most powerful leaders stood before the television cameras and promised drastic change, including an annual aid increase of US$50 billion by 2010 with half going to Africa, many Africans cheered. But a year on, the cheers are fading.

"They earned great kudos, internationally and at home: It looked like they were really doing something," Oxfam Great Britain's Muthoni Muriu said of the pledges made at last year's Group of Eight (G8) summit, which host British Prime Minister Tony Blair had seen as the culmination of a year focused on Africa.

"We really must celebrate what little steps have been made," said Muriu, the British charity's Kenyan-born West Africa programme director. "But we must see the big picture, which isn't that good."

Disease, conflict, illiteracy: Africa's ills are well known.

But the solutions are not. Africans face a web of interlocking woe: How can you train workers if pupils are not fed well enough to concentrate in school? How can businesses succeed if skilled employees fall sick with malaria? How do you stop the spread of malaria if the mosquitoes that carry it thrive in open sewers?

Implicit in the G8 promises were expectations African leaders would do more to embrace democracy and clean up corruption. There, again, progress has been fitful.

On the West's side, leaders promised universal access to AIDS treatments by the end of the decade and even as firm figures are hard to come by, movement towards that goal was made in 2005, many agree.

While development experts say more should be done, the United States is credited by many with focusing attention on AIDS in Africa.

Most concretely, the International Monetary Fund has cancelled the debt owed it by many African countries and further reductions by other international lenders are scheduled, for those countries and others. The G8 said US$55 billion in debts could eventually be forgiven.

That act alone freed up cash that would have been used to pay the debt's interest, if not even the principal. Now, Africans and their international partners are building roads, financing schools, and stocking shelves in health clinics.

After Zambia's red ink was wiped away, that country began offering its people free access to basic health care.

But sceptics say Western agencies granted many of the loans during the Cold War as inducement to African leaders to ally against the Soviets.

Plus, there was little chance that many of the African countries would ever pay off the loans. It is easy to write off a lost cause, the pessimists say.

What is hard, development experts say, is for Western political leaders to make decisions that hurt their own voters. Increasing direct foreign aid, as promised in Scotland, translates directly into diminished public coffers.

International groups are accusing some of the G8 countries of "double counting" or moving debt write-offs to the aid-granted column, showing an increase in giving on balance sheets even as the pot of actual currency for projects in Africa may shrink.

Oxfam says that when the debt write-offs are factored out of Britain's reported 2005 aid of US$10.6 billion, that country actually spent 2 per cent less than in 2004. France and Germany also came out in the negative column, according to Oxfam.

Many of the Gleneagles promises are not designed to be fulfilled for many years, so it is difficult to judge whether there has been firm movement over the past year, analysts say.

Some political leaders agree they need help sticking to their stated aims.

Source: China Daily