Feb 22, 2008

Bush’s Africa Trip Promises Money to Follow

by Laura Starita

President and Mrs. Bush returned to Washington yesterday after a five-country tour of Africa. The Bushes visited Benin, Rwanda, Ghana, Tanzania and Liberia, where Mr. Bush made some positive promises of new or continued funding for public health and development efforts. The highlights of Bush’s trip include announcements of a $698 million grant to Tanzania from the Millennium Challenge Corporation and $350 million to combat neglected tropical diseases, announced in Ghana. These promises come after the most recent Bush budget proposal includes a five-year continued commitment of $30 billion to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

President Bush’s support for Africa has been one of the highlights of his administration. In a much sited statistic, official aid to Africa has doubled on his watch, and current commitments could lead to it doubling again within two more years. This is a positive trend. Positive also is the way in which the Bush administration allocations are being dedicated to specific projects which are measurable. For example, MCC funds are specifically given to countries that fulfill governance criteria. Similarly, the Global Network for Neglected Tropical Disease Control estimates that with pharmaceutical donations it costs a mere fifty cents to treat NTDs for which there is a known cure/preventative, making it possible to assess the success of Bush’s gift based on the number of people it helps. This type of giving is far superior to the budgetary wasteland which allowed Jeffrey Sachs to point out in his book The End of Poverty that in 2002 debt servicing, debt relief, foreign consultants, food aid and emergency aid ate so much into the US foreign aid allocations to Africa that the amount of money that actually reached the average sub-Saharan African was three dollars. In that kind of a system, quadrupling the amount of money given and then spreading it out over all the Millennium Development areas wouldn’t promise to result in much more than aid apathy.

Also useful is to look at African success stories in which the United States has been intimately involved. Take Liberia, a country coming out of a decade of civil war. Liberia benefited in 2003 from American diplomacy and military assistance in ousting its corrupt leader, Charles Taylor. A small, continued American military presence remains in the country to help keep peace and train a native military, the kind of Western assistance economist Paul Collier says is critical to help countries in a conflict trap emerge from it. There is also Rwanda, where PEPFAR has worked with the government to provide anti-retrovirals to nearly 45,000 people and provide counseling to many hundreds of thousands. These are examples where US money can go very far to make a difference.

Yet no discussion of Bush’s Africa trip would be complete without pointing out his problematic avoidance of places where United States involvement, or lack of involvement, has not been successful. Violence in Sudan, Chad, Somalia and, to a lesser extent, Kenya come to mind, as does PEPFAR’s track record in the area of AIDS prevention. Craig Timberg points out in the Washington Post that PEPFAR’s well-documented success at getting anti-retroviral drugs to Africans has not been mirrored by equal success in prevention. Similarly, while abstain, be faithful, use condoms (ABC) interventions as a whole have seen success, PEPFAR still requires 33 percent of prevention budgets be earmarked specifically for abstinence campaigns, an arbitrary requirement that aims to keep equal allocation among A, B and C, but that does not take into account the local specifics of the epidemic. These failures make US foreign aid successes all the more important—and indicate approaches future leaders should hope to avoid.