Africa aid cuts provide health ‘opportunity’
Semafor ·
Governments across the continent relied heavily on USAID, Washington's development agency, to fund health programs before it was shuttered last year.
Western aid cuts offer African nations a “major opportunity” to regain their independence after years of overreliance on overseas assistance to fund public health services, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention told Semafor.
Governments across the continent relied heavily on USAID, Washington’s development agency, to fund health programs before it was shuttered last year. Some 700,000 people have lost their lives in the past 18 months as a result of the development cuts, the head of a global aid organization said last week.
Yet “even if administrations change in Western countries, we’ll never again have the level of support we had in the past,” Jean Kaseya said in an interview on the sidelines of Semafor’s The Next 3 Billion event. Kaseya said he was working with African governments to cut waste by eradicating fraud in procurement and salary payments, citing the example of one nation (which he did not name) in which half of salaried health staff were found to be “ghost workers.” Kaseya, who said there was “no doubt” the Ebola outbreak in DR Congo was made worse by the cuts, also urged governments to mobilize domestic resources through taxation.