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Radelet: Bush Policies Have Made a Difference in Africa

Council on Foreign Relations

Interviewee: Steven Radelet, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development
Interviewer: Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor

February 13, 2008

Steve Radelet, an expert on African developmental issues at the Center for Global Development, says President Bush’s policies toward Africa have been largely beneficial to the continent. Radelet highlights increased aid to HIV/AIDS victims, and to programs dealing with tuberculosis and malaria. He describes the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a mixed government-industry approach to foreign aid, is “imaginative and creative” even though it has been slow to get off the ground. While he shares concern about Darfur and other African conflict zones, Radelet also says Americans need to consider the continent’s impressive progress toward democracy over the past two decades.

President Bush will be traveling shortly to Africa on a trip where he will want to highlight some of the achievements of his administration. When he took office in 2001, did Africa figure much in his foreign policy?

It really didn’t. He said very little about Africa. The administration’s basic approach coming into office was that it was not going to get very engaged in what was called “nation-building.” He had not said very much about debt relief and in the early days of the administration, what some senior officials said and did in relation to the HIV/AIDS crisis was actually not very helpful. So the expectations at the beginning of the administration were not very high at all. There were not too many new initiatives at that point.

What changed?

Things began to change early on. There were some signs, even in 2001, that they were going to take debt relief more seriously. The World Bank pushed an initiative to move toward more grants [as opposed to loans]. After September 11, all sorts of things began to change on the foreign policy front.

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2008 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.