Bush pledges to double aid to Africa
US president George Bush, urging new help for Africa before an international meeting focused on its problems, said he wanted to double aid to the troubled continent over five years.
The increase includes initiatives to battle malaria, provide legal protection for women and education to girls. The aid plans impressed some advocacy groups, even though they said most of the doubling would come from already-pledged money.
“Across Africa, people who were preparing to die are now preparing to live, and America is playing a role in so many of those miracles,” Bush said in a wide-ranging speech yesterday.
Bush is preparing to attend the G8 meeting next week of major industrial democracies and Russia, in Scotland. The summit host, Prime Minister Tony Blair, has made Africa a top item for discussion.
Bush’s initiatives go along with €554m in emergency famine relief announced this month and an agreement on Africa debt rlief. They help the president blunt criticism of his rejection of Blair’s proposal for summit countries to increase aid to Africa to 0.7% of their gross national product.
Bush says agreeing to Blair’s plan is not necessary because aid has tripled during his presidency, although the US gives far less as a proportion of national income than most other industrialised nations.
National security adviser Stephen Hadley said Bush’s new proposal would raise US assistance to Africa to €7bn in 2010, from €3.4bn in 2004.
Those figures include aid that is channelled through organisations such as the World Bank.
The Rev David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, said Bush’s promise would be achieved mainly by offering debt relief and fulfilling past commitments.
But Beckmann, whose Washington-based organisation lobbies to end hunger, said that level of aid would make “the US a serious partner in the global effort to reduce poverty in Africa”.
That, he said, “should be a plus for how people around the world view the US”.
Chad Dobson, policy director for the charity Oxfam America, hoped the announcement would mark the beginning of a much larger US commitment. He praised it as creating “the momentum that is needed” going into the Scotland meeting.
Critics also dispute Bush’s claim that assistance has tripled on his watch. They say his administration undercounts what was spent in the Clinton years and overcounts that spent during his presidency.
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