Low income countries must be protected from the full force of the economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund is even melting down gold and converting it into dollars to assist the 80 or so governments involved. A total of 17 billion is being made available in the form of interest-free loans. Will the money make a difference?

In the streets of the Ghanaian capital Accra, Emmanuel Dogbevi can see the effects of the economic crisis taking hold. Bread prices keep going up. And water is more and more expensive. Families are increasingly sinking into the raw world of poverty and occasionally he gets a phone call from a friend asking for money.
 

Promise

Emmanuel, who works as a journalist for ghanabusinessnews.com, is keeping a critical eye on the IMF. He is not exactly clapping with glee at the dollars now coming in his direction.
 

Ghana has already been promised 600 million dollars to compensate for the crisis. It is a country where the first tender shoots of democracy are beginning to be seen and where oil has been discovered. Good reasons for the IMF to act fast in the hope that these fragile developments are not crushed by the crisis.
 

But Emmanuel believes the organisation is not flexible enough and that poor countries could end up in trouble. Ghana and Tanzania are, for instance, being treated in the same way and that's not a good sign.
 

One size fits all

“The problem with the IMF is that one size fits all. That does not help individual countries. The IMF has to allow countries to adopt their own policy, to allocate their own money.”
 

Peter Chowla of the Bretton Woods Project in London, which monitors the IMF, shares this criticism. The IMF is a behemoth which needs to become more flexible and adapt its policy to the countries themselves. Otherwise the obligations the countries take on in order to be able to pay back the IMF loans will affect areas like education and healthcare.
 

“Unfortunately they have done very little to adapt their loans policy,” says Peter Chowla. “Now more loans are being made and the amounts of money going to developing countries are higher. And the loans are now a little cheaper for those countries. But these are still the same kind of programmes which have been criticized so much in the past. Because they force developing countries to take money out of education and other public spending areas.”
 

Where are they?

Ghanaian journalist Emmanuel Dogbevi is not only pointing his finger at the IMF. African government must also do better. You can transfer billions of dollars, but where are they?
 

Ghana is now fashionable with the international community, he says, and many Ghanaians are going with the flow since oil has been found. But the authorities are still corrupt. He recounts an incident which occurred in January. A new government was about to be installed and the transitional team involved got through 100,000 dollars worth of food and drink in the space of three weeks. “A ridiculous amount” he says. So ridiculous he wrote an article about it.
 

“The problem is not how much money the country is getting, it's how it will be spent. In Africa, and particularly in Ghana, there is no chance of development if the government fails to use the money wisely.”
 

Positive results for the IMF? Emmanuel reckons you can forget about that.