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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 August 2021
Of all the policy issue areas that concern the U.S. government in its relations with Africa, economic assistance policy has attracted the deepest and widest involvement from U.S. university scholars. University-based analysts have enjoyed numerous avenues of access to officials who define, design, implement and evaluate U.S. foreign aid programs for sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. universities have stronger institutional linkages with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) than with any other Washington institution discussed in this ISSUE, including the U.S. Congress and agencies within the the national security bureaucracy.
Michael Bratton is Associate Professor of Political Science and African Studies at Michigan State University. He wishes to thank the more than forty people — policymakers, advocates, and scholars —who provided the information on which this article is based, but whose names cannot be listed because they were promised confidentiality. David Gordon and Jeffrey Riedinger provided helpful comments on an earlier draft Full references and bibliography available upon request.
1. The discussion here explicitly excludes the Department of Defense which administers foreign military sales and military assistance programs, and the Department of Agriculture on whose behalf USAID manages the Food for Peace program. The article touches only tangentially on the Department of the Treasury which oversees U.S. contributions to multilateral institutions such as the World Bank group, the United Nations Development Program, and the African Development Bank.
2 From a merger and expansion of the International Cooperation Administration and the Development Loan Fund.
3. A 1987 survey revealed that a majority of Americans (54 percent) favor U.S. economic assistance to other countries, a level of support that has remained fairly steady for three decades. But 85 percent of Americans also believed that a large part of aid is wasted by the U.S. and Third World bureaucracies.
4 For example, in 1987 the U.S. devoted 0.2 percent of its GNP to official development assistance, the lowest proportion of any OECD country, versus 1.1 percent for Norway.
5. The following Title XII project is fairly typical. In Sierra Leone, a combined Team from Southern University and Louisiana State University trained agricultural researchers, extension workers and farmers in adaptive crop research and extension, developed new technologies for several crops, and helped increase the production and nutritional status of farm households.
6. At the time of writing, the Congress had raised the Bush Administration’s 1991 budget request for the Development Fund for Africa from $560 million to $800 million, but it is unclear whether the budget will permit this level of spending. The Afro-Caribbean lobby within Congress introduced the “Mickey Leland Bill” (H.R. 4443) which proposes gradually increasing annual DFA appropriations to $1.2 billion by 1995.