JOHANNESBURG, June 12: Africans and global aid groups praised rich countries on Sunday for forgiving billions of dollars in debt but said more could still be done and the challenge was to get the poorest to benefit from the help.

Britain’s finance minister Gordon Brown said on Saturday the G8 — Britain, Japan, Canada, the United States, France, Italy, Germany and Russia — had reached a deal to write off all the multilateral debts of some of the world’s poorest countries.

Relief agencies said it was the type of move they had been campaigning for, but the G8 could go further and expand the list of countries to benefit as well as the basket of relief offered.

They also said often some aid from Western countries seldom reached the poorest who needed it most, being distributed somewhere between donor countries and recipient African states.

“Very substantial bottlenecks exist in funding moving from commitment to actual help. Sometimes such gains do not reach those who need them the most,” said Greg Ramm, head of the UK charity Save the Children in Southern Africa.

His group wanted to see the gains from debt relief go to improving schools, healthcare and provision of food — especially for children, Ramm told Reuters.

The $40 billion offered by the G8 in debt relief would be enough to wipe out debts owed to international organisations by 18 countries which are at the so-called completion point of an IMF and World Bank initiative.

Completion point is the date when the scheme’s debt write-off becomes effective. The 18 countries are: Benin, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Honduras, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.—Reuters