Last year, this tsunami of depressing statistics crashed in to the state rooms, board rooms and living rooms of the world`s wealthiest nations. In July, the G8 put together a package of measures, later endorsed at the World Summit in New York in September, which aimed at doubling Africa`s GDP by 2015. Just one year on, progress has been described by one prominent campaigner as “off track” on several fronts. Still, the commitment to double aid by 2010 stands as a lasting testament to Africa’s year in the international spotlight.

Most observers agree that poverty in Africa will only become history when the continent is generating enough of its own resources to tackle the problem. Whether and how the commitments made last year can trigger a virtuous circle of rising investment, exports, incomes and social welfare is therefore the big question in the aid debate.

Some critics see more aid as part of the problem, stifling market-based solutions to poverty reduction. Others fear that much of the money will simply end up in Swiss bank accounts or lining the pockets of international arms dealers and development consultants. These are genuine concerns, though, as became clear at the World Bank annual meeting last month in Singapore, there is no consensus on how best to tackle them.

In fact, governance problems (including corruption) are as much an effect as they are a cause of underdevelopment, requiring what Joseph Stiglitz describes as "an intricate plan of attack". In any case, they should not shield us from some of the other, and often bigger, forces behind the economic woes of the region. Africa, contrary to much of the popular rhetoric about globalisation, has long been open to international market forces. Indeed, its history of development has, from colonial times onwards, been disproportionately concerned with the needs of foreign trade and foreign firms. King Leopold is not the only ghost haunting Africa. That legacy is manifest in an illogical political geography and in deeply unbalanced economies, heavily weighted towards the export of one or two commodities, shaped by decisions taken elsewhere and with little concern for local needs, and highly vulnerable to external shocks of various kinds.

This has been particularly apparent since the early 1980s when a series of interest-rate and oil price shocks generated a deep economic crisis, which persisted over two decades due to declining commodity prices, heavy debt servicing and misguided austerity measures. Twenty five years of the neo-liberal policy mantra to "stablise, liberalise and privatize", as the way to break decisively with the inward-looking agendas of the post-colonial period, has itself failed to turn things around and almost certainly made the situation worse; agricultural productivity has been declining, fledgling industrial sectors have been downsizing and the informal economy has mushroomed across the region.

These factors go some way to explaining why the aid channelled to SSA since 1980 has failed to make poverty history. A simple numerical exercise illustrates the point. If SSA had simply continued its growth performance of the 1960s and 1970s up to the present time, it would have generated a cumulative $3 trillion in additional domestic resources. The $400bn in assistance received by SSA over the period 1980-2005 (i.e a little over one eighth of that lost output) has (literally) been band aid, staunching and covering up social wounds exposed by economic collapse. As such much of it has worked. But it has not been development finance, on the scale and in the direction, needed to reverse that collapse.

A ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’ has been suggested as one possible answer to getting more from aid this time around. Such parallels rightly evoke the generous and speedy aid to Western Europe after 1947. However, there was much more to the original plan than just the money. Marshall aid:

· provided a realistic time frame for European adjustment boosting investment and allowing output to expand without pressing too hard on living standards or the balance of payments

· replaced a piecemeal and emergency-driven approach with a more coherent and strategic one that paid close attention to political feasibility when designing economic reconstruction programmes,

· acknowledged the value of familiarity with local conditions by insisting recipients draw up their own long-term reconstruction plans and promoted peer group discussion of targets and policies to meet them

· recognised that adjustments would be neither instantaneous nor painless, and that policy makers needed sufficient space to meet the goals of growth and full employment

Sadly, these principles for managing aid were lost amid the fog of Cold War politics, and later ditched altogether by proponents of structural adjustment. Doing so has left a chaotic aid landscape of overlapping agencies, donor-driven projects and multiple conditionalities, imposing considerable burdens on overstretched African bureaucracies and compounding difficulties of domestic resource mobilisation.

Reviving these principle in the context of the big aid push launched last year implies a new kind of aid architecture. In the first place, a consensus needs to be built around strengthening productive public investment. This has declined by some 8 percentage points in SSA over the past quarter century deeply damaging local infrastructure, and dragging down private investment. Doing so will mean a reversal in the recent trend of using aid for social spending, including to projects falling under the donor-friendly rubric of providing "global public goods". The latter, while highlighting genuine concerns for the international community, has become a new source of politicising aid budgets, whether through the war on terror, energy security (a looming influence in large parts of Africa) or health scares.

Following the Marshall Plan, much more responsibility for spending aid should be ceded to local institutions with sufficient policy autonomy to pursue their own development agendas. This will require that the additional aid to Africa take the form of grants, is channelled predominantly through budget support, and with a lot less spent on technical cooperation. In many cases, it will involve boosting bureaucratic capacity to design and implement national programmes and priorities. Paying greater regard to local preferences may not always produce what is conventionally regarded as the “best” policies but harnessing local knowledge should increase the effectiveness of programmes. It also stands a better chance of nudging the discussion of economic policy in a more democratic direction, reducing the possibility of capture by rent-seeking elites and making policy makers more accountable to national constituencies rather than foreign donors.

Taking local ownership seriously also requires changes in international aid modalities. In contrast to the international trading system, where they are distrusted, bilateral (country-country) arrangements continue to dominate the aid architecture. The share of multilateral aid to Africa needs to rise sharply from its current figure of 30 per cent. Doing so can help reduce unnecessary and costly competition among donors, improve coordination, and greatly reduce administrative costs. It can also provide a buttress against the politicisation of aid.

But such a rise should not be channelled through the softer lending windows of the World Bank and IMF. These institutions have, at regular intervals since the early 1980s, been predicting the revival of African economies. Their Micawberesque bias is understandable; from market-friendly reforms through structural adjustment programmes to the HIPC initiative and Poverty Reduction Strategies, economic policy across most of the continent has, for the past 25 years, been set from these Washington-based institutions. Predictably recent favourable growth numbers have been interpreted as heralding an African economic renaissance.

In reality, their record on aid delivery has been politically charged, has imposed excessive conditionalities on recipients and has remained wedded to formulaic policy approaches divorced from the structural and political realities of the region. Market fundamentalism has failed Africa big time and without a frank acknowledgement and open discussion of this failure combined with a genuine search for pragmatic policy alternatives, the chances are that doubling aid will also fail to deliver this time around.

There are encouraging signs that some donors -- including it should be said the British government (witness the recent spat between Hilary Benn and Paul Wolfowitz over World Bank policy conditionalities) – are ready to tackle the systemic weaknesses in current arrangements. One possible way to move things forward would be to rework the resources in to a development fund under United Nations auspices designed explicitly to handle additional aid to Africa and geared to boosting productive investment and employment. This should be run by an independent secretariat without day-to-day interference from its contributors, reporting to the General Assembly and audited regularly by an independent body. Such a Fund could run parallel with that suggested by Britain`s prime-minister-in-waiting who earlier this year called for just such a facility for disaster relief and reconstruction. A parallel Fund for economic development could also be a catalyst for attracting other sources of development finance, including from Mr Brown`s own idea of an International Finance Facility.