Redesigning U.S. Assistance to Africa in the Post-Pandemic Era.

• Author: Wentling, Mark
• Position: Viewpoint essay

Title: Redesigning U.S. Assistance to Africa in the Post-Pandemic Era

Author: Mark Wentling

Text:

As someone who has worked on development assistance programs in Africa for over 40 years, I strongly believe the U.S. can be more effective in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries by making profound changes in the way it uses its limited resources to deliver assistance. Decades of work with USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), the Peace Corps and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) tell me that in order to make our resources achieve long lasting results, the U.S. needs to narrow its focus and concentrate its assistance on those countries which can best use it to improve the quality of life of its people.

The first step is to decide in which countries the U.S. should be working and why. The U.S. must focus its resources on fewer countries and in a handful of sectors. By spreading limited resources thinly over the continent, the U.S. risks achieving little or nothing. It is difficult for me to admit that most of the assistance projects I have been involved with over the past several decades in SSA have had no-to-little lasting impact on improving the lives of Africans. Half of SSA's population still lives in extreme poverty. And the dreadful negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic will make things worse. Already, most of the world's poverty is concentrated in SSA.

The population of SSA has almost doubled since 2005 and now stands at over 1.3 billion. A rule of thumb is that for any country to prosper, the economic growth rate, adjusted for inflation, must be consistently at least two percent higher than the population growth rate for a decade or more. Even the best performing SSA countries fail in this regard. It is sad to note that many SSA countries have received billions of dollars in U.S. aid since 1960, yet remain among the poorest countries on the planet Assist First the Poorest Countries

A new SSA assistance strategy would focus on specific countries, or parts thereof, as well as on designated sectors. U.S assistance should give priority to the poorest countries, helping satisfy the basic human needs and rights of their most vulnerable population groups.

The United Nations Development Program's annual Human Development Index can be used to identify the countries needing the most help. Thirty of the 35 countries categorized in 2019 in the lowest ranks of this index, which includes 189 countries, are in SSA. The bottom dozen countries on this index are all in SSA. These twelve countries and others classified in this low human development category should be the beneficiaries of future U.S. aid to Africa.

In addition, I recommend the elaboration of a comprehensive risk profile ranking of SSA countriesthat can be used to make decisions on how much funding the U.S. government should commit to provide to an individual country over the long term. These decisions should be based on human needs and not on other U.S. foreign policy objectives that do not relate to improving the quality of life of Africans.

If any of these countries are to see their human development indices rise, the majority of their people must have adequate levels of health care and education. Health care includes...