LONDON: One Saturday last July, more than half the world’s population watched a bunch of ageing rock stars run through their back catalogues. At the behest of Bob Geldof, Pink Floyd agreed to a reunion; Paul McCartney sang Hey Jude. As darkness fell, the Who summed it up for those mixing pop and politics: Won’t Get Fooled Again.

Live 8 came halfway through a year when Africa was given unprecedented attention on the world stage. As Duncan Green, head of policy at Oxfam, put it: “Listen to the number of times you hear politicians using the words ‘make poverty history’. In terms of brand recognition, it’s enormous — bigger than Jubilee 2000.” But what did it all achieve?

At the start of 2005, a year in which the UK held the presidencies of the G8 and EU, the government urged the public to hold it to account. Throughout the year, the Guardian has been doing just that, starting a year ago when the G7 finance ministers met in London. With the G7 and Russia meeting this weekend in Moscow, it is time to assess what happened.

There is still a spotlight on Africa. At a packed meeting at the World Economic Forum last month, Nigeria’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo, said such a gathering at the annual meeting of the CEOs from the world’s richest companies would have been unimaginable. He was right. At the same meeting, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, pledged to raise Berlin’s aid budget to the UN target of 0.7 per cent of GDP.

Live 8 was followed four days later by the Gleneagles summit at which Tony Blair badgered the rest of the G8 industrial countries to sign up to a reciprocal deal: more aid, trade and debt relief in return for a commitment by Africa’s leaders to improve the way they governed.

Despite being forced to dash back to London by the bombs on 7/7, Blair returned to Scotland a day later to finalize a deal which saw the G8 agree to 100 per cent debt relief for poor states from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the African Development Bank; a rise in aid to $50bn a year by 2010; anti-Aids drugs for nearly all who need them; and a pledge to protect 85 per cent of vulnerable Africans against malaria.

This was the high water mark of 2005, with the Hong Kong meeting of trade ministers in December a disappointing non-event. Gleneagles was an impressive package, but, politics being politics, it was oversold, not least by Geldof. That was a mistake. Not all poor countries got debt relief, the aid package was by no means all new money and there was little progress on the third leg of the stool — trade.

Even so, the opprobrium heaped on the G8 by campaign groups was also a mistake. It was both unfair and counter-productive; unfair because it was some achievement, given the financial pressures on every G8 country, bar Canada, to get as far as Blair did at Gleneagles, and counter-productive because mass campaigns can quickly run into the sand if those enthused to join them are told that their protest is having little or no effect.

By the end of 2005 both politicians and campaigners were taking a more measured view of the year. The consensus is that 2005 was worth six, maybe seven out of 10. Most other recent presidencies would have been worth one or two out of 10, if that.

What now troubles policy-makers is that the promises of 2005 will mean little unless they are put into practice in 2006. They recognize that much needs to be done. Gordon Brown admitted that debt relief needed to go to almost 70 countries, not the 18 which received it in the first round.

He wants to see the G8 provide the money for free education and universal healthcare. “If 2005 was the year of commitments, 2006 must be the year of delivery,” he said.

For their part, the aid agencies are now also able to put the year into perspective. “We didn’t make poverty history, but Gleneagles was not a bad result,” said Green. “We certainly got more than we would have done had we not had all that pressure. It has left us with a huge amount to do to make sure what happened at Gleneagles is pushed through.”

A year-end report by Save The Children was more critical. “Progress has been made and it’s a credit to world leaders that they showed some willingness to act. But the giant leap forward demanded by campaigners has not been delivered.”

That is a fair assessment, although it was always obvious that Make Poverty History was more a rallying cry than a do-able project in just one year.

Three big challenges lie ahead. The first is to complete the 2005 agenda — delivering the debt relief, the aid to build up public infrastructure, and securing a trade deal that decisively tips the balance in favour of developing countries.

Blair has a list of milestones he wants to see achieved by the end of 2006: if they are, it would mean three million people receiving Aids treatment, 40 countries in an Education For All fast-track initiative, timetables in place to hit the $50bn aid target by 2010 and an African Union stand-by force able to deploy a contingent of 20,000.

The second is to recognise that the onus is not just on the West but, crucially, on Africa as well to make good on its pledges. Downing Street sources frankly admit that it has been deeply disappointing to see a crackdown on dissidents in Ethiopia and an anti-democratic trend in Uganda, not least because it gives succour to those who argue that debt relief and aid are simply throwing good money after bad.

It has not all been bad news. Nigeria’s attempts to tackle corruption and its determination to use the windfall from high oil prices to secure a debt-relief deal offer hope for west Africa. But with plenty of examples of bad governance, Blair risks being hoist by his own petard. If, as he argues, there is no point in throwing money at an unreformed public sector at home, what is the argument for throwing money at unreformed governments in Africa?

Finally, there is the challenge of recognizing that development is far more complex than the simple nostrums of both left and right would suggest. One of the benefits from the focus on Africa in 2005 has been to energize debate on what really helps countries to develop quickly.

Matthew Lockwood, a former head of policy at ActionAid, said in his book, The State They’re In : “Neither liberalization nor foreign aid is guaranteed to lead to industrialization and sustainable economic growth — what counts is the quality of intervention, and therefore the nature of the state.”

The real lesson from east Asia is that rapid development requires more than aid and more than free trade. If 2005 achieves nothing more than a recognition of that, it will have been a year well spent. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service