JULY-AUGUST 2005
In this section:
Democracy Aid Up to $1.2 Billion
Bush Pledges Aid to Africa for Malaria, Food
Albanian Officials, Public, Train for Elections
Media Campaign Tells Palestinians About $1.5 Billion in U.S.
Aid
Democracy Aid Up to $1.2 Billion
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Pjerin Marku of the Albania Coalition Against Corruption,
an NGO that has trained some 3,000 domestic election
observers. USAID has funded Marku’s group, media
monitoring efforts, training sessions for officials
at the Central Election Commission, and a voter awareness
campaign, among other pre-election activities.
Stephanie A. Pepi, USAID/Albania |
After more than 15 years of USAID support for democracy around
the world, major democratic opportunities are emerging in
Lebanon, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and many other countries,
Administrator Andrew S. Natsios said in a major address May
25 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Agency programs for democracy support has increased to $1.2
billion this year, although nearly half is aimed at helping
Iraq and Afghanistan set up their first free elections for
local and national governments.
“So something is happening, and I wanted to describe
to all of you, in a formal way, the strategy AID has pursued,
actually, for 15 years,” Natsios told the Advisory Committee
on Voluntary Foreign Aid.
“We are the largest democracy-promotion donor in the
world,” Natsios said, noting that the Agency has 400
democracy officers around the world and is creating a new
category of officer—democracy and crisis management—to
work in fragile and failing states. USAID also plans to publish
its democracy strategy in July.
Natsios cited a wave of democratic advances—such as
elections in Ethiopia and other countries—some of them
influenced by President Bush’s strong support for worldwide
democracy in his second inaugural address.
“We believe [people have]…an inalienable right
to have control over the governments that govern them,”
Natsios said. “That is what freedom is about, and that
is what democracy is about, and we believe in that as a moral
principle.”
U.S. backing for democracy also is based on practical and
security considerations, he said.
Without democracy, “many developing countries are not
making progress,” which, in turn, produces “a culture
of alienation, of repression, in some countries where extremist
movements have developed,” Natsios told the meeting.
In addition to providing election support, USAID democracy-building
programs include training judges and prosecutors, supporting
NGOs and human rights groups, helping independent media, and
offering training in political organizing to all political
parties that support democracy.
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NGO officials who trained local election observers
discuss the division of monitors to be posted to each
Albanian region.
Kristina Stefanova, USAID |
USAID programs also support groups that fight corruption
so that people don’t lose faith in elected governments.
“In…incompetent or corrupt or predatory governance,
which sometimes happens, the democracy doesn’t last too
long because people don’t see it as an improvement. They
see it as a problem,” Natsios said.
He also noted strong support for private radio and television
stations in Afghanistan as a mainstay of building the democratic
process.
Other mainstays include party-building, strengthening congresses
and parliaments that are newly elected, and development of
civil society through NGOs.
“That is, of course, what rose up in the Ukraine, and
in Lebanon, and in Kyrgyzstan, and in Georgia, when there
was an attempt by governments to repress democratic reform,”
Natsios said.
He also noted that many Latin American countries had set
up elections, but they left most of the people out of the
political process, resulting in tension, discontent, and political
instability.
“One of our biggest challenges in some countries is
ethnic, tribal, religious discrimination of entire groups
of people from any participation, at any level, in the political
system,” Natsios said.
“People wonder why democracy is destabilizing in parts
of Latin America. Eighty-five percent of the people of Bolivia
do not speak Spanish, and they are from the two major Indian
linguistic groups. Up until recently, they were not in the
parliament, and they certainly don’t own any businesses,
and they’re not in the universities. Fifteen percent
of the population, which is white, dominated the entire country…There
is a sense of being aggrieved….”
Bush Pledges Aid to Africa for Malaria, Food
The Bush administration’s announcement that it wants
to spend $1.2 billion to prevent malaria over the next five
years will help USAID “make a qualitative leap”
in the fight against a disease that kills more than 1 million
people in sub-Saharan Africa every year, said Administrator
Andrew S. Natsios.
The announcement June 30, which also included an additional
$400 million to continue a program that expands education
in sub-Saharan Africa, came on the heels of two other sizeable
new initiatives to help people on the continent.
Earlier in the month, the administration announced that
it will provide an additional $674 million in humanitarian
aid—for food and other assistance—to more than 14
million people in Horn of Africa countries who are facing
a severe food crisis.
In addition, the administration joined with governments
that make up the Group of Eight (G8) to offer debt relief
to 18 poor countries, 14 of them in Africa. The effort will
erase $40 billion owed by the nations.
The move is also expected to let these countries redirect
money that would have gone to pay down their debts toward
meeting their own development initiatives.
The three announcements—made just weeks apart in June—came
on the eve of two major summits discussing issues on the continent.
The African Growth and Opportunity Act forum is set for
July 18–20 in Senegal. It follows the meeting of leaders
from the G8 countries—Canada, France, Germany, Italy,
Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States—in
Scotland July 6–8, where Africa was on the agenda.
Africa accounts for at least 90 percent of the world’s
malaria deaths each year, most of them among children under
age 5.
“Because we have virtually eliminated malaria in the
United States over the last century and a half, people here
and in Europe don’t think about it as a disease,”
Natsios said. “That does not mean that this is not a
major health problem in Africa. In fact, it’s a health
crisis.
“The President’s goal…is to reduce malaria
deaths by 50 percent in each of the target countries by the
end of 2010.”
The first three countries slated to receive aid to fight
the mosquito-born disease are Tanzania, Uganda, and Angola.
In addition to the physical devastation caused by malaria
in Africa, it is estimated to cause $12 billion in economic
losses each year. The link between immediate humanitarian
needs in Africa and its countries’ long-term development
is one message Natsios has been stressing in recent weeks.
“Too often humanitarian relief has been separated from
development,” Natsios told the United Nations in advance
of the G8 summit. He added that the $674 million in new food
aid will “assist states in crisis and conflict return
to stability and get on the path to sustained growth.”
The food aid, which will be administered by USAID, is primarily
aimed at Ethiopia and Eritrea, and comes on top of the $1.4
billion already committed this year for emergency food relief
to African countries.
The Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET), which
is funded by USAID, puts both countries in its list of current
emergencies, the most serious designation on the warning scale.
In Eritrea, five years of drought, labor shortages, and
a shortage of hard currency reserves have left many households
with no stores of food. The latest report from FEWS NET in
May showed Eritrea’s current food supply would last only
through the end of July. About 2.2 million people are at risk.
In Ethiopia, which has endured a number of devastating famines
since the 1980s, some 12 million people require food assistance.
Approximately $414 million of the money Bush has pledged will
be used to provide food to these two countries. The rest—about
$260 million—will be spent on food and other humanitarian
assistance in other countries.
In spite of these efforts, the immediate situation in Africa
remains precarious.
A recent United Nations appeal for assistance to sub-Saharan
Africa revealed that 44 million people across the continent
require humanitarian aid in the form of food, shelter, water,
sanitation, healthcare, and protection.
Only slightly more than a quarter of the $3.5 billion needed
to help these people had been received from the world’s
governments by mid-June.
Albanian Officials, Public, Train for Elections
TIRANA, Albania—A month before Albania’s
parliamentary elections, a dozen people heatedly discussed
where observers should be posted to monitor the July 3 elections.
Maps with pen marks and yellow Post-It stickers abounded.
“We will follow the election, looking for problems
and irregularities. We will follow everything that will happen
from the beginning to the end,” said Pjerin Marku of
the Albania Coalition Against Corruption, an NGO that has
trained 3,200 domestic election observers through a USAID
grant.
The meeting participants were the heads of the seven local
organizations conducting election monitoring. Among them was
Gerta Meta of the Society for Democratic Culture, an NGO that
has monitored 14 local and parliamentary elections in Albania
since 1992.
“We hope on behalf of civil society that people will
vote, and we hope that big numbers will go,” she said.
“This election is very important for our country, for
integration with Europe.”
In a room next door to the meeting, half a dozen computers
were registering the amount of press each party received in
newspaper, TV, and radio coverage.
Every two weeks, since May and through the election, media
monitors hold a press conference and reveal their findings.
“This is the first time that we monitor not only quantitative
data, but also qualitative,” Marku said. “After
the first report, a lot of media changed the way they report
about the campaigns” to make their coverage more objective,
he said.
USAID this year spent $2.2 million on support to parties,
civic forums, televised parliamentary debates, NGO monitoring
of the electoral process, and media coverage of the elections.
Another $1.3 million was invested on the official side of
the elections, mostly providing technical assistance to Albania’s
Central Election Commission (CEC). The national voter registry
was updated, and all data were entered into a computer data
bank.
USAID helped the CEC create digital maps of all regions,
pinpointing where people reside, the size of local populations,
and where the nearest voting sites should be. The maps were
also used by local governments to prepare voter lists.
The Agency backed training for election officials on the
new election law, which was passed December 2004.
One of the law’s features is the institution of centralized
counting. In past elections, each of Albania’s 4,700
voter polling stations counted and reported its own results.
This time, ballot boxes will be packed and transported to
100 zonal counting centers, reducing the possibility of fraud.
CEC officials were sent over the past year to observe the
voting process in Britain and Austria, where vote counting
is also centralized. Hundreds of voting instruction manuals
were also printed for the officials.
With U.S. aid, the CEC held a voter-awareness campaign called
“My Vote,” urging voters to cast ballots and educating
them about what ID to present and how to properly mark their
votes.
TV and radio spots ran for months. Sample voting kiosks
were set up on the streets of 14 cities. Ads also ran on street
banners, billboards, and in newspapers. The message to vote
was even placed on sugar packets.
“This is the first time that anything like this has
been done in Albania,” said Adriatik Mema of the CEC.
“These promotional materials have been done even in the
language of minority groups, so you can find them in Greek,
Serbian, Macedonian.”
Some promotional posters addressed specific issues such
as family voting, an illegal practice where one family member
brings documentation for their relatives and casts a ballot
for each of them.
* The elections took place peacefully, but official results
were not available as of press time, July 12.
Media Campaign Tells Palestinians About $1.5 Billion in
U.S. Aid
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Palestinians Learn about USAID
Newspaper, television, and billboard ads showing Palestinians
drinking clean water or using other services provided
with U.S. aid have appeared in the West Bank and Gaza
as part of a public information campaign. International
channels also carried the message to a wider Arabic-speaking
audience. More than $1.5 billion in aid for water, health,
and education services has helped 3.6 million Palestinians.
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Ramallah, West Bank—In newspapers, on televisions,
and on billboards, Palestinians are finally learning that
many of the things that make their lives better these days—fresh
water, roads, and schools—have been provided with the
help of U.S. foreign aid.
The ad campaign to inform the public in the West Bank and
Gaza about the more than $1.5 billion in U.S. aid in the past
10 years started in early May. A few days later, President
Bush signed a $200 million supplemental assistance package
aimed at promoting Palestinian economic development.
The television commercials—showing Palestinians drinking
clean water or using other services provided with U.S. aid—were
created after a survey reported that 95 percent of Palestinians
were unaware that U.S. taxpayers’ dollars were behind
recent improvements.
The survey showed that the NGOs, contractors, and international
agencies who carry out USAID programs were failing to inform
the Palestinians that U.S. funds paid for the improvements.
The research found that only 5 percent of Palestinians were
aware that the American people had funded development projects
in their communities. Most believed that USAID was the name
of a group funded by international organizations like the
United Nations Development Program and the World Bank, or
by NGOs like Save the Children.
The focus groups surveyed also showed that anti-American
views, including contentions that the United States conducts
a politically biased foreign policy unsympathetic to the plight
of the Palestinian people, went unchallenged for years.
To change this and inform the public about the massive U.S.
aid program in the region, USAID/West Bank and Gaza, which
is based in Tel Aviv, began the outreach campaign.
It consists of three messages describing the contributions
of the American people in the water, health, and education
sectors. USAID has invested more than $1.5 billion since 1993
in those sectors, in addition to economic development, community
services, and better governance projects that have aided 3.6
million Palestinians.
Each ad ends with the phrase “from one people to another,”
followed by the USAID logo and the words “from the American
people.”
All three Palestinian dailies carried the ads in full color
and nearly full page. Some 70 massive billboards displayed
the ads at major intersections through the West Bank and Gaza.
The TV spots, which focused on children, ran 1,600 times on
nine local TV channels, and the radio spots ran 2,700 times.
International channels such as Al Arabiya and MBC ran the
TV spots 100 times, bringing the message to a much wider Arabic-speaking
audience.
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by the Bureau for Legislative and Public Affairs
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