The development of Africa has been a key issue of almost every G8 summit agenda. World leaders have always called to increase aid, which the continent has received since the last 50 years; yet the African continent is worse than it was in these years.

Aid is never a solution to Africa. Rather, the problem is that aid is fragmenting: there are too many agencies, financing too many small projects, using too many different procedures. "Fragmentation is the opposite of effectiveness," says Lennart Bage, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 38 poor countries each had 25 or more official donors working in them in 2006. The number of aid projects financed by bilateral donors has skyrocketed from 10,000 to 80,000 over the past ten years.

NGOs are more numerous. Their explosive growth explains much of aid's fragmentation. The UN reckoned there were 37,000 international NGOs in 2000, a fifth of which had been formed in the 1990s. There are almost certainly more now. NGOs are increasingly important to the aid business. By one estimate, they spent $27 billion of aid in 2005, compared with total official assistance of $84 billion. The Gates Foundation had a budget of $3.3 billion in 2007; more than Norway, Denmark or Australia spend.

Some of the targets are sensible and even stand a chance of being hit. It is obvious that aid should help recipient countries, but that idea is forgotten when donors fence their projects, using their own experts (not local people) to build, run and evaluate operations. Between 2005 and 2007, their number did indeed fall, by about 10% in 33 countries. But big problems remain. In Mozambique, says Oxfam, a British NGO, donors are spending a staggering $350m a year on 3,500 technical consultants, enough to hire 400,000 local civil servants. "Aid should strengthen local capacity rather
than spawn parallel aid empires," says Robert Fox, Oxfam's top representative in Accra.

Leaders of the G8 developed nations in their recent submit in Italy have pledged $20bn (£12bn) for efforts to boost food supplies to the hungry. Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, announced at the press conference concluding the L’Aquila G8 Summit that the aid fund for Africa had risen from $15 to 20 billion over three years. Food security and aid for the African countries had been the pivotal topics on the third and final day of the Summit. Africa has vast fertile land which could feed the whole world; why aid then?

President Obama is expected to reveal a major initiative to boost agricultural development and prevent hunger in Africa, worth perhaps $3bn (£1.8bn) to $5bn, at the summit.

The Japanese government also says it wants the G8 to put more emphasis on helping African farmers to produce enough food to feed local communities.

Japan spent more than $1bn supporting agricultural projects in developing countries in 2007 and has pledged to increase spending on this area, despite a recession.

In a report, the charity ActionAid says that a billion people are still hungry in the world today and that despite the drop in food prices it is still a key issue for many developing countries. And it says that the percentage of foreign aid spent on agriculture has "been in freefall" in the last 25 years and the remainder is "poorly targeted and coordinated".

ActionAid says that only $5bn of the $10bn pledged at the last G8 summit for the food crisis has been disbursed, and warns that it could worsen in the next two years, as the financial crisis pushes another 200 million people into poverty.

Aid organizations have criticized some members for failing to deliver on the promise made at the 2005 G8 summit to increase annual aid levels to sub-Saharan Africa by $25bn by 2010. And now the leaders have, among others, agreed that the economic and financial crisis is hitting hardest the poorest and risk jeopardizing progress made in health, eradication of hunger and poverty. Leaders underscored the need to act swiftly to restore growth and implement adequate measures to protect the most vulnerable. G8 countries reiterated their commitments, including those made in Gleneagles and more recently at the G20 London Summit, to support African efforts towards promoting development, good governance and achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Most of African countries are unable to make any progress towards the millennium development goals; rather many of them are progressing negatively. Only few, including Eritrea, young and not dependent on foreign aid, is expected to meet the goals and especially in the health sector. Eritrea, through its independent line and a strong political commitment, is making a swift progress in ensuring food security by developing its agricultural infrastructure. Such a policy is what exactly the continent of Africa needs in order to overcome starvation.

Italy, the present summit host, has come under particular pressure for cutting, rather than increasing, aid this year. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has said the global economic crisis and Italy's mounting debts are responsible for a delay in Rome meeting its promises.

The G8 countries are the US, the UK, Germany, Japan, Italy, France, Canada and Russia.