Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 30 2005 (IPS) — Less than a month after rebuffing British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s calls for a massive increase in aid to sub-Saharan Africa, Pres. George W. Bush announced plans to double annual U.S. aid to the world’s poorest region by 2010 and launch new initiatives to cut the number of its malaria deaths by half and boost enrollment, especially of girls, in primary schools.

Speaking on the eve of next week’s Group of Eight summit to be hosted by Blair in Gleneagles, Scotland, Bush said Washington will add 400 million dollars for boosting school enrollment and 1.2 billion dollars for anti-malaria efforts to its existing aid plans over the five-year period.

"(W)e intend this effort to eventually cover more than 175 million people in 15 or more nations," he declared about the malaria initiative in a four-page speech to invited guests at the Freer Gallery along the Washington Mall close to the White House. "We want to reduce malaria mortality in target countries by half, and save hundreds of thousands of lives."

The malaria campaign will initially target Tanzania, Uganda, and Angola, before expanding to include other nations, he said, urging other wealthy countries and private foundations – of which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already been actively engaged in the anti-malaria fight – to join the effort.

Reaction to the Bush’s announcements was mixed. Blair welcomed the speech as "an important and welcome step (that) creates real momentum for a successful outcome at Gleneagles" where, as host, he has placed Africa at the top of the agenda.

Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have been pressing Bush to sharply increase aid and debt relief for African nations were somewhat more circumspect.

Chad Dobson, the policy director of Oxfam America, called the announcement a "welcome first step" but suggested that the amount of additional money proposed by Bush will still fall far short of Washington’s fair share of the estimated 25 billion dollars that Blair and the U.N. estimate are needed in additional annual assistance to achieve poverty reduction targets in Africa by 2015.

He estimated that the total amount of "new" money that is not already in the budget pipeline will amount only to about 900 million dollars a year over the five-year period as existing programmes, such as Bush’s multi-billion-dollar Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), were already expected to expand significantly over the coming years.

He also noted that Congress may not go along with Bush’s requests. Indeed, the House of Representatives this week approved only 1.75 billion dollars of a three-billion-dollar request for the MCA’s 2006 budget.

The MCA, a programme to sharply increase bilateral U.S. aid to some of the world’s poorest countries that Bush announced with great fanfare three years ago, has so far approved less than half a dozen projects totaling only about 500 million dollars. As a result, actual U.S. aid increases to Africa – as compared to Bush’s early commitments – have lagged badly.

"The next step should be more money and turning today’s commitment into budget plans to ensure that the money gets to people who urgently need it," said Dobson who also expressed concern that the proposed malaria programme "will bypass …existing (multilateral) arrangements (such as the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria) and undermine the effectiveness of national plans to fight this killer disease."

Mohammad Akhter, president of InterAction, a coalition of some 150 U.S. development and relief groups, also praised the speech as a "great first step" but echoed concerns that the administration may take the additional money from other aid programmes or bypass existing multilateral and bilateral mechanisms in spending any additional money.

Africa Action, a national group that played a leadership role in the anti-apartheid movement here, was even more sceptical, calling Bush’s announcement on the eve of the G-8 summit "compassionate showmanship" that fell "far short of a bold commitment to supporting African efforts to fight poverty and promote development."

"The Bush administration’s Africa policy is more noteworthy for its public relations efforts than for any benefit to the African continent," said the group’s director of policy analysis, Ann-Louise Colgan, who noted that "none of the claims and promises of new funding for Africa made by the White House in recent years have fully materialised" and that Bush himself will have left office by early 2009.

Bush has come under growing pressure since he dismissed Blair’s appeal for a doubling of U.S. assistance during the latter’s White House visit earlier this month as being impossible to meet given the U.S. budgetary process.

Instead, he announced that 600 million dollars that had gone unspent in other foreign aid accounts would instead go to relief and related operations in Africa this year. A week later, the U.S. Treasury backed a G-8 plan to cancel 40 billion dollars in debt owed by 18 of the poorest nations, 14 of them in Africa.

Still, NGOs and a number of conservative black pastors, some of whom had supported Bush’s re-election, called on the president to go much further.

Earlier this week, leaders of the U.S. evangelical movement, considered a core constituency for Bush, joined with mainstream Christian leaders in urging a much greater commitment to African development.

"We would like to see the Bush administration turn a good record on Africa into a great record on Africa," said Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals. "We are lending our voice in a way never before done."

Bush’s announcements Thursday appeared to be his response to that pressure, as well as to the fact that the other G-8 leaders have largely gone along with the Blair agenda.

In addition to the 1.2 billion dollars to be spent on anti-malaria efforts and the 400 million dollars on school enrollment, Bush said he will ask Congress to provide 55 million dollars over the next three years to promote women’s justice and empowerment in four African nations which he did not identify.

On malaria, which kills an average of about 3,000 African children every day, Bush said comprehensive action in the three initially targeted countries will include indoor spraying and the supply of insecticide-treated nets and new combination drugs to treat the disease. He said four more highly endemic countries will be added to the programme in 2007 and at least five more in 2008.

Bush depicted the new commitments as both an answer to conscience and "because our interests are directly at stake."

"September the 11th, 2001, Americans found that instability and lawlessness in a distant country can bring danger to our own," he said. "…We fight the war on terror with our power; we will win the war on terror with freedom and justice and hope."

In another significant passage in his speech, Bush repeated for the second time in a month that the violence against African residents of Darfur, Sudan, constituted "genocide." He said Washington will transport 1,000 Rwandan troops to the region next month as part of a NATO operation to support an African Union operation and will help build 16 additional base AU camps there.