UN Official Wars AIDS Crisis Could Wreck Africa’s Future

Speaking at a September AIDS conference in Kenya, UN AIDS Program director Michel Sidibe warned that, if left unchecked, the AIDS epidemic threatens to become a catastrophe that will wreck Africa’s future.

Sidibe’s speech reinforced the findings of a UN AIDS report, “Accelerating Action Against AIDS in Africa,” that called for increasing the pace of action against AIDS,

The effects of AIDS in Africa are eroding decades of development efforts. In high-HIV-prevalence countries, families are unraveling, economies are slowing down, and social services are deteriorating. In Southern Africa, where HIV prevalence is higher than anywhere else in the world, AIDS has exacerbated food insecurity, demonstrating how the epidemic and humanitarian crises intertwine.

AIDS has killed an estimated 15 million people in Africa already, and signs are not encouraging to prevent another 15 million deaths. The UN AIDS report notes that infection rates in southern Africa are unbelievably high — in Botswana, for example, 40 percent of the adult population is believed to be HIV positive. A World Health Organization study of pregnant women in southern Africa found 20 percent of those tested were HIV positive.

More money is being committed to fight the AIDS crisis in Africa, but whether aid agencies and governments will be able to translate that money into an effective anti-AIDS strategy remains to be seen. If they fail, Africa’s future is likely to be as bleak as its recent past.

Source:

AIDS ‘threatens African security’. The BBC, September 21, 2003.

U.N.: AIDS Is Major Challenge in Africa. Associated Press, September 21, 2003.

Ugandan Defense Minister Says LRA Maintains Training Camp in Sudanese-Controlled Territory

Ugandan defense minister Ruth Nankabirwa told Kampala newspaper New Vision that Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony is still operating a training camp in territory controlled by the Sudanese army, though she was diplomatic enough to avoid accusing Sudan’s government of supporting the LRA.

Nankabirwa said,

He (LRA leader Joseph Kony) still has a rear base camp some two to three kilometres northwest of Nisitu junction, which is behind Sudan army lines and our forces deployed there cannot do anything, because the protocol under which they are deployed does not allow them to go beyond some lines.

. . .

We are taking diplomatic steps to make Sudan honour its obligations under the protocol. But it should be noted that the Sudan government has not fully responded to the outstanding issues raised by Uganda.

Sudan’s government is apparently blaming the continued presence of LRA bases in its territory on rogue military elements, although Sudan has a long history of providing both direct and indirect support to the LRA.

Source:

Sudan Officers Shield LRA. New Vision (Kampala), December 1, 2003.

BBC to Its Own Reporters: Shut Up Already

The BBC’s Greg Dyke has spent the last few weeks telling anyone who will listen just how much superior the BBC coverage of the invasion of Iraq was to that of American media (as long as you ignore minor problems like the Andrew Gilligan affair).

Apparently Dykes and the BBC have such faith in their correspondents that they are going to pay them not to wrote for British newspapers. According to the Telegraph,

Under new rules, which are being introduced by the BBC because of concerns raised during the Hutton Inquiry about its journalists’ activities, senior broadcasters including John Humphrys, the Today presenter, and Andrew Marr, the corporation’s political editor, will be prevented from writing columns, which can earn them as much as £100,000 a year.

. . .

The corporation hopes that these payments will avert the risk of senior journalists defecting to rival channels, where they would be free to resume newspaper work.

. . .

Andrew Gilligan, a reporter for the Today programme, who first raised the issue in a radio broadcast, further infuriated Downing Street when he expanded on his claims in The Mail on Sunday.

The subsequent death of Dr David Kelly, who was Mr Gilligan’s original source for the story, led the Government to establish a committee of inquiry under Lord Hutton. That inquiry is expected to be critical of the way the BBC and its board of governors, in particular, handled the affair.

So Gilligan’s reporting wasn’t fair and balanced? Who would have thunk it.

(Hint to the BBC: you might try actually hiring quality reporters rather than hiring flakes and then paying them extra not to write embarassing articles putting their biases and inadequacies on full display).

Source:

BBC pays £2m to key staff for not writing. Chris Hastings and Martin Baker, The Telegraph, November 11, 2003.

Dean Has Nothing to Hide — And Just to Make Certain, He’s Keeping His Records Secret

This Newsweek story about Howard Dean and me laughing out loud in my office this morning.

The best line comes near the end where Dean’s legal counsel chief counsel David Rocchio complains that Dean’s opponents are distorting his record as governor of Vermont. So if you’re a politician who is concerned about others distorting what you really did, what is the obvious recourse?

Exactly — hide all the records for a decade so neither reporters nor your political opponents can have access to them!

Then last January, Dean’s chief counsel David Rocchio negotiated a sweeping agreement that resulted in about 140 boxes of Dean records containing several hundred thousand pages of documents being locked up for 10 years at a state archive in Middlesex, said Greg Sanford, the state archivist. The sealed papers include Dean’s correspondence with advisers on, among other matters, Vermont’s “civil unions” law and a state agency that critics charged was used to grant tax credits to Dean’s favored firms.

As with the Bush administration’s penchant for hyper-secrecy — which Dean himself has criticized — hiding the records simply increases the speculation that there’s something there worth hiding.

Source:

WhatÂ’s in Howard DeanÂ’s Secret Vermont Files?. By Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, December 8, 2003.

World Development Report Highlights Failure of Developing World Governments to Provide Basic Services

The World Bank’s World Development Report 2004 concludes that many developing countries fail to provide even the most basic of services to their citizens and the developing world is likely to miss the targets of the Millennium Development Goal. The Millennium Development Goal called for halving poverty and improving meeting basic needs of people in developing countries by 2015.

The problems with services range from lack of improved sanitation to few educational opportunities. For example, 2.5 billion people still lack access to improved sanitation around the world.

The report finds that — surprise — simply throwing money at these problems rarely arrives at solutions. The Middle East, for example, spends more per capita on education than any other developing region, but still has some of the highest illiteracy rates in the world due to unequal access for women and girls.

According to a press release announcing the report,

The productivity of public spending varies enormously across countries. Ethiopia and Malawi spend roughly the same amount per person on primary education – with very different outcomes. Peru and Thailand spend vastly different amounts – with similar outcomes.

The Report concludes that no one size fits all. The type of service delivery mechanism needs to be tailored to characteristics of the service and circumstances of the country. For instance, if the service is easy to monitor, such as immunization, and it is in a country where the politics are pro-poor, such as Norway, then it can be delivered by the central government directly, or contracted out. But if the politics of the country are such that these resources are likely to be diverted to the well-off by way of patronage, and the service is difficult to monitor, such as student learning, then arrangements that strengthen the clientÂ’s power as much as possible are necessary. Means-tested voucher schemes, as in Colombia or Bangladesh, community-managed schools as in El Salvador, or transparent, rule-based programs, such as MexicoÂ’s ‘Progresa”, are more likely to work for poor people.

The report recommends three basic ways to improve basic services to the poor,

1. By increasing poor clientsÂ’ choice and participation in service delivery, so they can monitor and discipline providers. School voucher schemes – such as a program for poor families in Colombia, or a girlsÂ’ scholarship program in Bangladesh (that paid schools based on the number of girls they enrolled) – increase clientsÂ’ power over providers, and substantially increased enrollment rates. Community-managed schools in El Salvador, where parents visited schools regularly, lowered teacher absenteeism and raised student test scores.

2. By raising poor citizensÂ’ voice, through the ballot box and making information widely available. Service delivery surveys in Bangalore, India, that showed poor people the quality of the water, health, education and transport services they were receiving compared to neighboring districts, increased demand for better public services, and forced politicians to act.

3. By rewarding the effective and penalizing the ineffective delivery of services to poor people. In the aftermath of a civil war, Cambodia paid primary health providers in two districts based on the health of the households (as measured by independent surveys) in their district. Health indicators, as well as use by the poor, in those districts improved relative to other districts.

Sources:

Basic services ‘fail world’s poor’. The BBC, September 21, 2003.

World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work For Poor People. World Bank, September 2003.

Is There Really a Link Between Small Arms and Poverty/Political Instability

Small Arms Survey released its 2003 report in July finding, among other things, that there are far fewer small arms circulating in Africa than previously thought.

Previous estimates of the number of small arms — weapons that can be carried by one person — put the total as high as 100 million. According to Small Arms Survey, however, there are only about 30 million small arms in Africa — about 1 gun for every 20 people.

Small Arms Survey blames the proliferation of small arms for causing instability in Africa and other developing regions. In a press release announcing the report, Small Arms Survey quotes United Nations Development Program administrator Mark Malloch Brown as saying,

[Small arms] have an insidious effect on development: by undermining the safety and security of communities, threatening livelihoods, and destroying social networks, they at best hold back and at worst contribute to the reversal of hard-won development gains. This edition of the Small Arms Survey makes an invaluable contribution to global efforts to develop and implement effective projects to limit the use and spread of small arms. It provides an important global point of reference for UND and other international agencies seeking to confront this critical challenge to human society.

Given the alleged inherent destabilizing nature of small arms, then, one would reasonably expect that the country with the highest level of small arms ownership would also be one of the most backward, underdeveloped spots on the planet. But, of course, the country with the highest penetration of small arms is the wealthiest country on the face of the planet — the United States of America.

While Africa has a measly 1 gun for every 20 people, the United States has an astounding 4 guns for every 5 people. Africa’s gun ownership rate, in fact, is just slightly above that of Europe, and Europe is hardly a hotbed of poverty and political instability either.

Sources:

One gun for every 20 Africans. The BBC, September 24, 2003.

Global Arms Survey Finds U.S. Most-Armed Nation. Edith Lederer, Associated Press, July 9, 2003.

Small Arms Survey 2003: Development Denied. Press Release, Small Arms Survey, July 8, 2003.