A UN agency has proposed a scheme reminiscent of the post-second World War II US-funded Marshall Plan to lead to improve the effectiveness of development aid delivery designed at lifting Africa out of poverty and supporting growth.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's (Unctad's) report, published on Thursday, emphasised that not only does aid for Africa need to be doubled, but that the channels used to distribute it needed to be consolidated and de-politicised.

Unctad's report, titled Economic Development in Africa: 2006: Doubling Aid: Making the “Big Push” Work, proposed that aid funds be released in trenches and at predictable time frames, over an extended period.

It also argued that there should be greater focus on enabling African economies to produce a wider range of goods and boost job creation.

Money should be channeled to countries' budgets, to allow legislature to determine how the money could best be spent.

The Marshall Plan, which helped revitalise European economies after the war, offered a generous multi-year and coordinated funding approach, where each state was able to draw up long-term recovery plans with no outside interference.

Immediate targets were used to measure progress, and rules and conditions on aid were applied in a flexible manner.

Unctad's report suggested that now was the right time to revisit the idea of a UN funding window tailored to Africa's development needs.

“This approach could help reduce unnecessary and costly competition among the donors, and therefore significantly reduce administration costs,” it stated.

“It can also provide a buttress against politicisation of aid which has been so damaged in the past.”

The changes suggested by the report required long-term attention, but had the advantage of offering a way out of the poverty cycle and also offered donor nations a potential end to recurring and increasing requests for help.

The report listed other shortcomings of current aid systems for Africa to include a focus on short-term results, the overly-high component of technical assistance and increasing targeting of social sectors, which do not address the need for African countries to build the productive infrastructure and capabilities that would improve their economies.

To meet the Millenium Development Goals, drawn up in the 90s, by the set date 2015, it was estimated that African economies would have to grow at some 8% a year.

Without more attention to their productive capacities, the report said that most of them would fail dismally in reaching these goals.