Though the federal government is struggling to make
Obamacare functional for Americans, the administration is simultaneously
helping to upgrade the health-care system in Kenya.
The ambitious plan to expand health-care and social-services
access to millions of Kenyans is one of several recent U.S. endeavors to
surface, indicating that yet another spike in assistance to Kenya is taking
place.
As U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor reported, the U.S. Agency for
International Development in June 2012 alerted contractors that its Kenyan aid
portfolio was growing “exponentially.”
Now, the most recent endeavor is the enhancement of an
existing “five-year mission supporting the centralized health-care system in
Kenya.”
In addition to heaping the cost of the programs on U.S.
taxpayers, part of the plan strips responsibilities from a U.S. contractor and
transfers it to a Kenyan company, according to planning documents the Monitor discovered via routine database research.
Although the Kenya Academic Model Providing Access to
Healthcare, or AMPATH, consortium is largely funded by international donors,
the U.S. will pay for segments of its modernization. Its goal is to “expand and
improve AMPATH integrated health system.”
The AMPATHplus initiative on a technical level will
consolidate the organization’s various software systems into a single business
management system; however, USAID also will transfer financial and
administrative control of AMPATHplus “from the current American contractor to a
Kenyan contractor” as it deploys this enterprise resource planning, or ERP,
software system.
Kenya’s Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Moi University
and partner Indiana University will retain operational control of the
AMPATHplus project. But now it will do so through a management board
representing those entities, the document says.
Among other targeted results, USAID is seeking contractor
assistance to:
- Continue social services initiatives that AMPATHplus
currently performs;
- Expand the Kenya Essential Package for Health primary care
services from the current 500,000 to 750,000; and
- Develop community-based outreach workers to identify and
follow up with pregnant women in a target population of 2 million people.
USAID separately launched the Kenya-based U.S. Trade and
Investment Center, or TIC, a potentially $70 million initiative aiming to boost
the economies of East African nations.
The agency acknowledged that the East African Community –
Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda – has “one of the fastest growing
economic communities in the world, growing faster than all other economic
communities in the last decade.”
USAID nonetheless deems it necessary to intervene, as “the
volume and variety of intra-regionally traded goods remains markedly less than
those of other trading blocs” such as Europe and Asia, the TIC Statement of
Work laments.
Additional obstacles to increased intra-regional trade
include substandard “operational efficiency and infrastructure” of major ports
in Mombasa, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Regional efforts to improve the shortcomings are underway,
but USAID believes “progress has been slow.”
East African railways, likewise, are “highly inefficient and
not yet competitively cost-effective with roads,” so U.S. taxpayers must help
correct such impediments, according to the agency.
USAID in another Kenya-specific initiative will pour upwards
of $55 million into a reading program over the next four years.
The agency last week alerted contractors about the Tusome
Early Grade Reading Program, “a basic education initiative to improve the
reading skills of the approximately 5.4 million individual Kenyan children who
will begin primary school during the 2014-2017 school.”
Tusome, which means “Let’s Read” in Kiswahili, initially
will be carried out by a contractor, but the program will “consider a
transition to government ownership” in later years, according to a recently
released bid request.
The Monitor recently reported that the U.S. Trade & Development
Agency, an independent White House unit, awarded a $300,000 grant to help
Kenyan and other East African power companies more effectively tap into the
U.S. Treasury.
The USTDA grant purportedly will complement Obama’s Power
Africa initiative – a multi-billion-dollar effort that is moving forward
despite concerns that a new public-private bureaucracy is needed simply to
overcome the pervasive corruption and incompetence of African governments and
power utilities.
This article originally was published by WND (Nov. 8, 2013). Under agreement with the publisher, rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock.
