OVERSEAS INTEL

How USAID avoids ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ in Africa

January 24, 2022 | Humanitarian & Aid, OVERSEAS INTEL

USAID

The world’s prosperous nations spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on “foreign aid.” But foreign aid can mean many things.

Most U.S. assistance, for example, falls into these categories:

• Emergency response and other forms of humanitarian assistance.

• Global health, such as programs to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases.

• Peace and security.

• Good governance, by funding accountability measures, judicial reform, and support for human rights.

Continue Reading ▼

Others believe that loans and business investments also are forms of aid. This can be true, but sometimes loans and investments come with strings. Loans must be paid back. Sometimes a country borrows to build infrastructure, and the donor nation’s own workers get the best construction and other jobs. And aid that does not guard against corruption can hurt rather than help the recipient nation. That’s why some kinds of foreign aid amount to debt-trap diplomacy.

Avoiding the debt trap

The U.S. seeks long-term partners rather than debtors.

Researchers at the College of William and Mary found that loan assistance does not improve economic growth. And, they noted, countries can have a hard time paying off the loans. Sri Lanka, for example, was forced to give up one of its ports in a 99-year lease to China when it struggled to pay for its loans.

“The price being paid to reduce the China debt could prove more costly than the debt burden Sri Lanka seeks to reduce,” said N. Sathiya Moorthy of the Observer Research Foundation in an interview with the New York Times.

Aid recipients can find themselves greatly indebted to a single creditor: Over half of Kenya’s sovereign debt, for example, is held by China.

Even when a program is not grant-based, the U.S. is working with countries to avoid the debt trap. India, for example, is trying a bold approach. A U.S.-backed initiative leverages private investor capital to improve health care for 600,000 new mothers and their babies in India. The project, which makes economic sense for the hospitals involved, is called the largest and most ambitious of its kind.

“This is our first health-impact bond. I’m quite sure it won’t be our last,” USAID Administrator Mark Green said at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2018. “It is a step forward toward a more sustainable and increasingly country-led approach to maternal and child health.”

Who gets the jobs?

Aid isn’t really aiding if it’s used to hire donor-country workers. One example: Nearly three-quarters of the laborers who constructed Angola’s Ombaka National Stadium were imported from China. In Cameroon, half the workers on a major port reconstruction hailed from China. Locals were not trained in engineering and other skills for high-value positions on the project. Even less-skilled positions such as truck drivers were filled by Chinese workers.

By contrast, consider how the U.S. structured the Power Africa program. Power Africa is a true partnership, working to add 60 million new home and business connections to Africa’s power grid. U.S. and private firms provide the financing to build the new electricity projects, but local workers are hired to do the work.

Osike Kenneth of Uganda said working on a solar plant helped his family through a 2016 famine. “Because I was working in the solar project, I was able to feed my family,” the 24-year-old said. Two Power Africa projects bringing reliable electricity to Senegal should create more than 68,000 jobs and grow the economy by $400 million, according to recent studies.

Administrator Green celebrated Power Africa’s multidimensional partnerships in a March event, highlighting an electricity project in Ghana. General Electric and Endeavor Energy are building the plant, which will supply about a fifth of the country’s power. U.S. government agencies are providing technical assistance and finance. The result? “Citizens being employed, communities being connected and Ghana charging ahead in its journey to self-reliance and prosperity,” Green said.

Transparency

Without anticorruption measures, aid can create economic distortion, according to James Roberts of the Heritage Foundation. “It reinforces instead of fixing the problems that undermine sustainable development — including corruption.”

That’s why U.S. aid programs include safeguards that allow people anywhere to follow the money.

The U.S. government makes public all of its program data since 1946 through the Foreign Aid Explorer. This “dashboard” of U.S. assistance presents decades of accurate data in understandable terms. The U.S. government also provides detailed foreign-assistance transaction data from 2006 to the present at Foreignassistance.gov.

Geoffrey Chongo of Zambia said transparency was crucial in starting up a $30 million electricity project in a community of 100,000. Four years after obtaining assistance, the government hadn’t started work. Community leaders spoke out. “They became passionate, to just find out where their money had gone. The government had to respond,” Chongo said.

Transparency also lets countries coordinate efforts to make development assistance more effective.

Green said that each sector — the public sector and the private sector — playing by the rules and doing what it does best, is key to prosperity for all. “This is Africa’s time, but only if all of us here work together.”

Military officials admit they knew that Afghan air force would fail when contractors left

January 20, 2022 | OVERSEAS INTEL, The Danger Zone

U.S. military officials knew months before the fall of the Afghan capital of Kabul that the country’s air force could collapse if contractors and aid were withdrawn, according to a recently declassified government report released Tuesday.

The report offers new insight into Defense Department officials’ awareness of serious problems well before President Joe Biden set an Aug. 31 deadline for a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country.

Continue Reading ▼

“Afghanistan is currently unable to support and sustain its equipment and capabilities, and DOD officials acknowledge that the U.S. needs to continue to support the Afghan air forces and help them build the capacity to do so,” said the report by John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction.

The 2021 time frame for the withdrawal of U.S. forces and support personnel was several years before the Pentagon’s own estimates of when the Afghan air force would be able to survive on its own, the report said.

Classification of a SIGAR report is rare, an official in the inspector general’s office told The Associated Press on Monday. When it does happen, though, a declassified version is issued within two months.

But in this case, the military did not allow the January 2021 report to be declassified until a year after it was issued.

The report shows that U.S. military advisers did not think the Afghan air forces had “the ability to sustain themselves” without foreign help.

The U.S. spent $8.5 billion between 2010 and 2019 to support and develop the Afghan air force and its elite unit, the Special Mission Wing, it stated.

Although the country’s pilots were able to attack Taliban positions, the air force did not have the ability to maintain its aircraft without expensive foreign contractors., the report said.

The Taliban entered Kabul on Aug. 15 after U.S.-backed President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital. Many of the warnings in the report were borne out during the final days of the Ghani government.

Over the preceding months, Afghan officials had warned that the air force was not able to stand on its own.

Ata Mohammed Noor, a powerful warlord in northern Afghanistan who was a key U.S. ally in the 2001 defeat of the Taliban, said the fleet was overused and under-maintained.

"Most of the planes are back on the ground. They cannot fly and most of them are out of ammunition," he said, according to the AP.

The SIGAR report substantiated those observations and said the U.S. prioritized building combat power over maintenance and support positions.

In contrast to aircrews and maintenance crews, support staffers had no guidelines for their training, though 86% of the Afghan air force consisted of support personnel, DOD officials said.

Neither the U.S. nor Afghanistan prioritized training for engineering, human resources, and financial management, the report said. At times, those positions were filled with grounded pilots.

Fixing and maintaining Afghan aircraft became increasingly difficult as the number of U.S. advisers in Afghanistan dropped by approximately 90%, from 498 to 59 personnel, in the wake of the withdrawal agreement.

Fewer advisers meant less oversight overtraining and contracting, leading to the use of teleconferencing in an effort to help maintain Afghan aircraft. Some planes needed to be taken out of the country to be fixed.

As the Taliban swept across the country, the Afghan air force ran out of key ammunition like guided smart bombs, Reuters reported in December.

Dozens of Afghan pilots and their families fled to neighboring countries with their U.S.-provided aircraft in the days before the Taliban took control of Kabul.

Can I join a Private Military Contractor company without ever being in the Military?

January 19, 2022 | Hiring Information

Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and BAE are among the largest defense contractors in the United States. They provide time, materials, and services to the U.S. Department of Defense, or DOD, to the tune of several hundred billion dollars each year. You needn't be ex-military to get a job with a defense contractor, but it does help if you have a military background and you're looking for a job with a private company that seeks contracting opportunities with the DOD.

Defense Contractor Employment

Defense contractors hire employees in a number of occupations. They employ engineers, human resources specialists, information technology professionals, finance executives, business development experts, lawyers and production and maintenance staff. They also offer career paths, such as management training programs that prepare new and seasoned workers alike with opportunities for advancement, regardless of whether they served in the military.

Military Advantage

If you have a military background, you might have a leg up on the competition based on your familiarity with military and defense concepts. You could rank at the top of the short list if you have a security clearance that's either active or easily reactivated, because many jobs with defense contractors require security clearance. Private employers, such as Raytheon, sponsor programs for transitioning military candidates because the company "values the strategic and tactical talents that only veterans can offer."

« Previous 1 … 64 65 66 67 68 … 294 Next »

Top ↑