After dismantling the main US body for delivering foreign assistance last year, the Trump administration is again offering hundreds of millions of dollars to African countries to support their healthcare structures and help fight disease.
News
But the new deals come with conditions attached and as a result, face resistance from some governments.
When the initial agreement was signed by Kenya’s President William Ruto in Washington last December, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he hoped it would be the first of many.
“We hope to sign, I don’t know, 30, 40, how many? Fifty? Well, this is number one. We’ll always remember this one⦠and we think we’ve picked the perfect partner,” Rubio declared.
Details
But even this landmark deal with Kenya, worth $2.5bn (£1.9bn), has been delayed by activists who went to court to block it, although cabinet ministers did finally approve it last month.
Shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump ordered the closure of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) amid accusations of wastefulness, in the process decimating health programmes in some African countries that relied on American funding.
The State Department’s new global health strategy requires recipient governments to share responsibility by increasing their own health spending, with the goal of building durable systems that can eventually be self-reliant. It is, for example, contributing $1.6bn to the overall deal with Kenya, external – with the East African nation pledging $850m over five years.
Analysis
The Trump administration hopes that partnering with national leaderships will improve on traditional donor-NGO relationships which it says created dependency, led to parallel delivery arrangements and sucked up aid dollars in overhead costs.
“Our aid to those countries will not just be dollars distributed to an NGO who then will go into the country and impose programmes,” Rubio told a congressional committee last month.
“Not only are we treating the acute situations on the ground of people that are sick, we are helping them build the capacity and the capability to do this for themselves.”
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