Obama funding ‘family planning’ in Ebola-stricken Africa

October 17, 2014

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As Ebola threatens to spread worldwide, with tens of thousands of new cases expected in Africa, the Obama administration is aiming to spend nearly $100 million on “family planning” and “HIV-AIDS’ programs for Kenyans.

This latest plan is connected to an existing U.S.-funded endeavor that provides “family planning, maternal-child health, malaria, nutrition, tuberculosis and HIV-AIDS preventive, care and treatment services” to Kenyans.

The contractor in the AIDS, Population and Health Integrated Assistance Plus, or APHIAplus, initiative says 10 percent of Kenyan adults – totaling more than 320,000 people – are HIV positive, claiming the problem stems from the absence of access to health-care services.

Pathfinder International at the same time acknowledges, according to a website posting, that more than 20 percent of Africans “have engaged in sex with low condom usage” by the age of 15.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, is looking to expand health-care access through what it calls the Afya Jijini and the Afya Pwani programs. USAID plans to launch the programs in Nairobi and in the Kenyan Coast region, respectively, according to a document WND discovered via routine database research.

Both endeavors will build upon the experiences and lesson learned thus far via “previous integrated health service delivery activities” and ongoing initiatives such as APHIAplus, which is slated to continue through December 2015.

The overall purpose of the Afya Jijini/Afya Pwani programs is to improve and increase “access and utilization of quality health services through strengthened service delivery and institutional capacity of county health systems.”

Create 47 corrupt counties?

Achieving the simultaneous strengthening of county governments and decentralization of federal power in Nairobi has been a major Obama policy objective in Kenya. The U.S. has provided billions of dollars toward the nation’s well-being while assisting in its transformation in accordance with its new Constitution.

The Obama administration has acknowledged the difficulty of redistributing political power across Kenya, whose national government is viewed as one of the most corrupt in the world. Indeed, the U.S. has acknowledged the risk of inadvertently creating 47 equally corrupt county governments to replace one massively corrupt national one.

The U.S. Department of State considers Kenya “an important developing country partner in east Africa,” making it “a significant recipient of U.S. foreign assistance.”

The administration, therefore, has requested $553 million in fiscal year 2015 assistance for Kenya. While overall aid to Kenya has dropped from a high of nearly $800 million during Obama’s first term, it is once again increasing.

According to the “presolicitation notice” that WND obtained, the official unveiling of the new Kenyan program remains subject to the availability of funds.

As the RFP for the Afya Jijini and the Afya Pwani programs has not been released, it remains unclear which hurdles, if any, USAID must overcome to obtain the go-ahead for the funding.

However, the House and Senate Appropriations committees already have vetted and reported on the FY 2015 State Department and foreign operations request and appear to generally concur with what the administration is seeking.

The House committee report, for instance, recommends less than $1.1 billion for USAID general operating expenses as opposed to the administration’s $1.3 billion request. On the other hand, the committee, specific to bilateral aid for global health programs, wants to spend about $300 million more than Obama’s $8 billion request.

Aid to Kenya does not appear to be an issue of contention for either of the committees.

As WND has been reporting for more than two years, however, the volume of U.S.-funded programs had grown so large that it has overwhelmed USAID, requiring the agency to hire contractors simply to sustain existing initiatives.

The agency also developed a sophisticated public-relations scheme targeting U.S. and international journalists in an effort to gain support for its Kenyan operations – a plan it quickly covered up after an WND exposé.

The administration in the past year not only continued on the path of expansive aid programs but has taken measures that shift burdens from Kenyan to U.S. taxpayers.

As WND reported, USAID earlier this year revised a project contract and awarded a no-bid sole-source extension, enabling a vendor to keep working on a federal decentralization project. The agency candidly admitted in the project documents that if the U.S. did not step in to offer additional help, Kenyan taxpayers would be unnecessarily burdened.

Earlier this year, the agency additionally awarded a $224 million no-bid contract extension to mega-vendor Chemonics International.

Timed with a massive decrease in the costs of HIV/AIDS-related drugs, USAID took the savings and handed it to Chemonics, thereby giving it another 15 months of work.

Chemonics in turn was tasked with rescuing the Kenyan government, which had failed to meet an agreed-upon deadline to assume control of a U.S.-funded pharmaceutical endeavor.

USAID, in its most recent Kenyan project, had planned to release a detailed Request for Proposals around Oct. 7 but has not yet done so.

The agency also has separately created a Senior Health Systems Strengthening Adviser position in the USAID/Kenya Office of Population and Health. An individual private contractor will fill the slot, serving as the leader one of four teams engaged in “strategic planning, design, evaluation” and coordination of efforts with development partners and the government of Kenya.

The position, which will be based in the U.S. Embassy Compound in Nairobi, pays in the range of $100,624 to $130,810, not including health benefits and access to Embassy medical facilities.

The agency likewise is recruiting a privately contracted senior drug procurement and treatment adviser to work out of the Nairobi compound, where the selected candidate will earn $85,544 to $111,203 plus benefits.

The following is a list of WND’s reports on Obama’s spending in Kenya:

Steve Peacock

Steve Peacock is a freelance writer and photographer whose work has appeared in the Tampa Tribune, WND, Drug Enforcement Report, Corrections Journal and the Revered Review. He also is a teacher, storyteller, actor and poet. Read more of Steve Peacock's articles here.

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