AIDS in Africa: The Question of Money
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At a meeting on the Fund in Lilongwe in November, Malawi’s Vice President Justin Malewezi offered these frustrated comments:
"The delay in addressing HIV/AIDS is as incomprehensible as it is immoral. Every minute we have been sitting in this room, 10 people have died of the three diseases. It is scandalous. It is scandalous because we have the knowledge, the technology, and the resources to address the challenges posed by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, but we have not yet mobilized sufficient political will…. This is a new holocaust. Without serious action now, tens of millions more will die. Every single death is an indictment on our consciences."
The U.S. isn’t hearing this message very clearly right now. In Ottawa at the recent meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, Britain’s Finance Minister called for a $50 billion increase in annual aid to developing countries, and James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, observed that most donor nations were very supportive of such a call. Not the United States. “Over the last 50 years,” Paul O’Neill, the Treasury Secretary, remarked, “the world has spent an awful large amount of money in the name of development without a great degree of success.” Well, yes. But it’s not as bleak a picture as he paints. There have been notable successes, in Africa and elsewhere, and even with the negatives we have learned a lot, and sometimes applied what we have learned.
Americans are supportive of expanding U.S. foreign assistance
The Congress and Administration aren’t hearing the American public very clearly on development assistance either. A comprehensive poll conducted by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy Attitudes this year revealed two especially intriguing views: First, that most Americans think the U.S. gives 20 times more in foreign aid than it actually does. And second, despite that view, 83% said that the U.S. should be willing to commit to expanded foreign aid that would support a joint plan for cutting world hunger in half by the year 2015. Americans overwhelmingly favor using U.S. development assistance to ease hunger and spur economic development in the world’s poorest countries.
Some in the U.S. will argue that we are already providing our share. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) released a book a few weeks ago entitled Leading the Way: USAID Responds to HIV/AIDS. In it they argued that the U.S. government, since 1986, has dedicated over $1.6 billion to fight HIV/AIDS in the developing world, about half of the global resources provided for the task, and four times as much as the next largest donor.
They pointed out that USAID moved from spending over $51 million on HIV/AIDS in Africa in fiscal year 1997 to over $108 million in the year 2000. We do not wish to denigrate these efforts. No doubt they are significant. But the reality, regrettably, is that as a proportion of our budget and of our wealth – and certainly in relationship to need – these figures cannot support a claim of generosity. In fact, the U.S. is the least generous. donor nation in the world, and the current development assistance appropriations show no departure from that status.
Our aid budget is 0.1% of our gross domestic product (GDP). As a share of our economy we’ve reached our lowest level of development aid since World War II.
Meanwhile, the number of people in sub-Saharan Africa living on less than $1 a day exceeds the entire population of the United States. Not surprisingly, their governments’ health budgets are miniscule.
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