EN - FR - Yükselen Afrika ve Türkiye / Rising Africa and Turkey 3

Foreign Aid and Africa’s Development 251ously organized for the bombing of Vietnam) as President of WB, thisapproach was euphemistically called “participatory development”. It involveda new strategy for rural development that supposedly benefited the poorest bylaying down a strategic role for international and indigenous voluntary actiongroups that were developmental and people oriented. According toMcNamara, this was the only way that poverty could be assaulted. It was duringthis period that two autonomous networking and coordinating agencies,namely, the International Foundation for Development Alternative (IFDA) andthe International Coalition for Development Action (ICDA) came into being,which brought the role of voluntary agencies to centrality in providing leadershipfor national and international development.The WB under McNamara since 1968 had introduced various reforms,including recruiting more third world nationals and also more women into seniorlevels of the Bank. The Bank was able to assimilate even those who wereless orthodox in terms of the Bank’s principles, including liberals and someodd ‘Marxists’. The period itself coincided with the emergence of indigenousvoluntary agencies mostly in Latin American countries mainly organized bycatholic followers who were to be identified with ‘Liberation Theology’, andestablishment of the Commission on the Churches’ Participation inDevelopment (CCPD) by the Geneva based World Council of Churches(WCC). With an avowed objective of “empowering local communities” thesewere to constitute a new consortium—the Ecumenical Working Group onAfrica, with six voluntary agencies from USA by the end of the 1970s. 2 Thesewere increasingly organizing local voluntary agencies, with the express aim toexplore and introduce “alternative strategies for African reconstruction anddevelopment”.The changing international economic context of the 1970s was necessitatingsuch transformations in the in Western conceptions about aid and development.The formation of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries(OPEC) had made the US policy makers to begin sounding the world about theimpeding “threat from the Third World.” The formation of OPEC was accompaniedwith the seizure of control of the world’s crude petrol market, whichwas formerly dominated by a handful of multinational oil companies—the socalled “Seven Sisters”. Raw material producers’ cartelization, take-overs ofmultinational corporations and repudiation of debt obligations, it was claimed,could hurt the West. By the time of the Carter regime the whole situation wasbeing described in terms of a conflict between the industrial nations and theless developed countries—the “new Cold War” as the US labeled it (Kristol1975: 5).