The USAID debate
Last week's visit by the newly appointed USAID/Egypt Mission Director Kenneth Ellis to Minya gave some insight into the role of USAID in a post-9/11 world, Gamal Essam El-Din reports
Click to view caption |
US director Kenneth Ellis and Minya governor Hassan Hemeida in a visit to Minya's pioneer USAID funded family planning project
|
Critics will talk of pervasive corruption, huge consultancy fees and hidden agendas aimed at stripping Egypt of its agricultural export potentials and purging the school curricula of their Islamic flavour. Proponents will point to remarkable strides in infrastructural development, health care projects that saved the lives of thousands of children, and centres that assisted in reducing industrial pollution. Analysts, however, agree that USAID has generated more controversy than development, and that this controversy has increased since the 11 September attacks and the war in Iraq.
Debate about the nature of USAID's role in Egypt has nevertheless done little to dampen the enthusiasm of American Embassy and USAID officials touring Egyptian governorates for a first-hand appraisal of the fruits of USAID projects. Even Liz Cheney, the 36- year-old daughter of US Vice President Dick Cheney and deputy assistant secretary of state for the Near East, is planning to visit Egypt at the beginning of next month. Cheney is the driving force behind most USAID assistance targeted at economic openness, political reform and decentralisation programmes.
On 19 October, US Ambassador to Egypt David Welch toured the Delta governorate of Qalyubiya with Governor Adli Hussein. Welch and Hussein reviewed part of an LE7-million nationwide programme for immunising children against polio.
New USAID Mission Director Kenneth Ellis paid a visit to the Upper Egypt governorate of Minya on 21-22 October.
He and Governor Hassan Hemeida launched an LE1-million joint US-Egypt project aimed at improving obstetrical and neo-natal intensive care and high-risk pregnancy facilities. The two officials also opened a new family planning project which offers basic services to rural women on reproductive health, maternal and child health, immunisations and control of infectious diseases.
The USAID family planning projects have always been under fire in the Egyptian parliament. MPs, especially those with leftist and Islamist leanings, usually charge that the USAID grants for these projects are rife with corruption and questionable practices. They also argue that the government has a moral imperative not to accept American funding for family planning projects. El-Badri Farghali, a leftist firebrand MP, believes that America has an interest in reducing the fertility of the Egyptian people, "because higher growth rates in Egypt could pose a future threat to the national security of Israel, America's protégé".
"President Hosni Mubarak has warned many times of the negative impact of the population explosion on development and economic prosperity in Egypt," Hemeida argued, adding that most of the services in this sector are provided under the guidance of religious clerics. He emphasised that birth control and family planning are supreme national objectives.
Hemeida told Al-Ahram Weekly that the family planning centre which he and Ellis opened, and which will serve the district of Mallawi, where thousands of poor families are in need of integrated reproductive health services, is funded through 2009. The Mallawi project is part of the National Family Planning Project (NFPP) that began in 1978 after Egypt and USAID agreed that the latter would provide the NFPP with funds, technical assistance and training.
According to a recent USAID report, the family planning partnership led the percentage of married women using contraception to reach 56 -- more than double the 1980 rate. The total fertility rate (the average number of live births per woman during her lifetime), the report added, has fallen by a third, from 5.3 in 1980 to 3.5 in 2000. The USAID spent more than $200 million on Egyptian family planning programmes over the last 25 years.
