Africa AIDS Funding Imperative

The Clinton administration said last week that it will allocate $150 million in next year’s budget to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases in Africa. The funding could help rein in an epidemic that is out of control. Of the nearly 14 million sub-Saharan Africans who died of AIDS since the early 1980s, 16% succumbed in the last year alone.

Getting Congress to actually allocate the money, however, will prove challenging in this election year.

During last week’s Republican debate in Grand Rapids, Mich., all but one of the presidential candidates said the Clinton administration’s promised allocation was premature because corrupt African nations would squander the money. As Texas Gov. George W. Bush put it, “before we spent a dime, we’d want to make sure that the people we’re trying to help receive the help necessary.”

Many African governments have indeed diverted aid money shamelessly. But programs established in recent years by nongovernmental organizations like the World Bank have proved their ability to curb the spread of AIDS in Africa through advertising and distributing free condoms, performing street plays that teach illiterate people how to recognize the symptoms of HIV, educating midwives on birthing techniques that help reduce mother-to-child transmission and subsidizing foster homes for children orphaned by AIDS.

Some critics of President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have suggested that the administration should support selling Africans cheap generic versions of anti-AIDS drugs patented and manufactured in the United States. Neither Republicans nor Democrats are likely to officially encourage foreign companies to do that, but Congress should pressure domestic drug companies to sell their lifesaving drugs at or below cost to impoverished nations.

The United States and other nations, most of them European Union members, that are joining the anti-AIDS effort should demand accountability from all countries and organizations that receive the aid dollars. Groups like Transparency International, a respected international organization that tracks government corruption, can help ensure that no money is wasted.

Given the astonishingly rapid spread of AIDS throughout Africa, the United States cannot afford a wait-and-see posture. According to a United Nations report released last month, in the next few years the disease will cause life expectancy in southern Africa to fall from 59 to 45 years.

In the last four decades, the United States has spent billions of dollars attempting to bring stability and prosperity to sub-Saharan Africa. Given the threat that a decimation of Africa’s economic, political and military establishments could pose to the region’s stability, reducing the spread of AIDS is not only a humanitarian imperative but a foreign policy priority as well.