US says it wants trade, not aid, in Africa. Cuts threaten both.
The United States is not so much in a financing mood. It wants deals.
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'Trade, not aid, is now the pillar of our policy in Africa,' Troy Fitrell, the State Department's top Africa official, said in a speech last week at a business summit in Abidjan. Minutes after he finished speaking, US and Ivorian companies signed more than half a dozen deals, including to supply drones for agriculture and mining, and scanning systems for border monitoring.
Trump has broken with the terms that defined decades of US involvement in Africa: He has shrunk the US Agency for International Development, imposed tariffs that threaten a free-trade mechanism with dozens of African countries, and rolled back anticorruption standards for American companies doing business with foreign partners.
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The Trump administration has also begun dismantling a little-known agency established by Congress in 2004 that finances the overpass in Ivory Coast and dozens of large infrastructure projects in a short list of countries. These include projects to expand electricity grids, build roads, or increase women's employment in places such as Indonesia, Nepal, and Senegal.
The funds go to governments, selected for their growth potential and good governance, rather than nonprofit groups. As China brings stadiums and railroads to Africa and Turkey builds airports, these projects could also strengthen US influence, experts say. Even as they align with Trump's protrade policies, they now hang in the balance.
Fitrell said last week that the United States would prioritize commercial diplomacy in Africa. The continent will be home to a quarter of the world's population by 2050, but countries south of the Sahara account for only 1 percent of US trade in goods. The Trump administration's strategy is meant to boost that, Fitrell said.
Yet African leaders and American experts, diplomats, and entrepreneurs have said that the agency, known as Millennium Challenge Corp., has boosted commercial diplomacy and directly benefits US interests.
Some have criticized the decision to shut it down. Erin Collinson, director of policy outreach at the Center for Global Development in Washington, called it 'incredibly shortsighted.'
'The MCC was funded as a unique aid agency that went around the USAID model and in a singular direction: promoting economic growth,' she said.
This month, the US ambassador to Ivory Coast, Jessica Davis Ba, visited the construction site of the overpass, which was started under the first Trump administration, and said US companies would benefit from better roads in the country. They include Cargill, which exports cocoa beans from Ivory Coast, and Exxon Mobil, which has deals for the exploration of two offshore oil blocks.
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Fitrell said the Millennium Challenge Corp.'s future has not yet been decided. The Trump administration has said it is willing to continue financing some infrastructure projects in Africa, like a $4 billion rail corridor in Angola meant to improve US access to cobalt and copper.
The agency spent $1.7 billion last year — less than 2 percent of the $59 billion in US foreign assistance obligations. It received waivers for five of the 20 projects it was planning or implementing before the Trump administration instituted a 90-day funding freeze on foreign aid this year. The overpass in Abidjan got an extension of a few months.
The deadline to complete the project before the funding runs out is early August, and it is unclear whether the Ivorian government will be able to pay for any final touches needed after that.
On a recent morning, construction workers checked the waterproofing of the four-lane overpass towering over the jammed intersection while commuters baked in the sun. They had yet to lay out the asphalt.
Hassan Koné, 39, said he and the passengers in his van had been stuck in traffic for two hours. American flags fluttered in the hot wind. Koné watched them, then sighed, 'The Americans need to hurry up and finish what they've started.'
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