Steve Peacock's U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor

Kaboom! State Dept. finally gives explosive answer (via WND)

My latest article gets top-of-the-page visibility. See “Kaboom! State Dept. finally gives explosive answer” via WND. -- S.P.

Bureau boss overseeing shipments has Benghazi connections

The State Department bureau tasked with secretly sending to embassies plastic and liquid explosives operates under the guidance of Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, whom a congressional panel last year separately found to be largely responsible for security lapses in Benghazi, WND has learned.

A series of WND articles recently exposed the purchase and international transport of many hundreds of pounds of plastic, sheet and linear explosives along with thousands of containers of high-energy liquid explosives.

Weeks after a State official laughed in response to WND’s inquiry, the department belatedly reacted to a follow-up request for information about how, where and by whom the blasting equipment will be used.

Read more at WND.com...

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NightTalker Radio: Michael David McGuire Interview with Steve Peacock

Commentary on Joseph Farah's editorial "Obama really is helping his country"

What a thrill it was to read yesterday's editorial by Joseph Farah, founder, editor and CEO of WND, on his publication's extensive coverage of Obama admininistration assistance to Kenya -- Barack Obama's "home country," as the First Lady once referred to the African nation.

I have been blessed with the chance to write the bulk of those articles via WND.com.

Mr. Farah clearly has recognized the value of this unparalleled coverage of "rapidly and exponentially" increasing USAID programs in Kenya. 

Indeed, it was precisely U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor's coverage of other U.S. government foreign-assistance initiatives that caught the attention of Mr. Farah when I first launched the Monitor in 2011, consequently leading to an ongoing publishing relationship with the WND organization.

It is with much gratitude to Mr. Farah -- as well as to News Editor Bob Unruh -- for the chance to regularly contribute to WND, which has the guts to take on issues the mainstream media often does not have the wherewithal or the chutzpah to pursue.

Obama Plan: Temp Jobs at $1 Million Each (WND)

My latest from WND -- S.P. 

The federal government’s portfolio of international health-care initiatives has grown so enormous that the Obama administration is infusing another quarter-billion dollars simply to help operate this global bureaucracy.

The estimated return on this taxpayer-funded venture: 250 new support staff.

Continued at WND.com...

ead more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/02/obama-plan-temp-jobs-at-1-million-each/#R1iMTbM7biAJgswS.99

Obama Studying Spending More … In Kenya

Move fuels USAID's already exponential growth in aid

My latest from WND. - Steve Peacock

Now that an $87 million African trade-promotion project is reaching the end of its five-year run, the Obama administration might spend millions more to decide whether it wisely invested U.S. taxpayer dollars in the venture.

If the Competitiveness and Trade Expansion, or COMPETE Trade Hub project, is deemed to have been effective, a follow-up program could receive more cash from the Treasury.

In this latest facet of a five-year U.S. Agency for International Development experiment in and around Kenya, the federal government will obtain contractor-conducted project evaluation services before committing additional funding.

USAID/East Africa wants to see if it had actually reduced barriers to “regional and international trade,” according to planning documents that WND discovered via routine database.

Continued at WND.com...

First Step of U.S.-Funded African Drought Project? Create New Bureaucracy

A $20 million Kenya-based anti-drought program continues its search for contractors to carry out the five-year endeavor for the U.S. government -- and half the estimated cost will be eaten up in Phase One, which establishes a management bureaucracy to oversee the project.

The U.S. Agency for International Development extended its vendor-bid deadline until Jan. 20, 2014, in the Resilience Learning Project, whose goal is to increase collaboration and "drought resilience" information-sharing among stakeholders in the Horn of Africa drylands.

The program is part of a larger Obama administration "resilience agenda" whose aim is to strengthen governmental and private responses to drought -- and the conditions that bring about drought -- in Africa, according to the initial Statement of Work.

Related programs include Resilience and Economic Growth in the Arid Lands-Accelerated Growth, or REGAL-AG, which seeks to improve the business climate for Kenyan livestock farmers.

As U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor previously reported, REGAL-AG was one of numerous Kenya-specific aid initiatives that emerged amidst a sudden spike in U.S.-funded Kenyan projects.

Soon after it was discovered that the Kenyan program -- in the admininstration's own words -- had "increased rapidly and exponentially, outstripping workforce resources available to effectively perform assessments and rigorous analyses … track results … manage recordkeeping, and other project development and program office functions.”

USAID subsequently sought to hire additional contractors to assist existing contractor already involved in such U.S.-Kenya initiatives.

FOR ADDITIONAL REPORTING ON THE U.S. AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT, SEE THE MONITOR'S USAID PAGE.

FOR MORE REGIONAL COVERAGE, SEE THE MONITOR'S KENYA PAGE AND AFRICA PAGE.

Obama Finally Fixing Health Care … In Kenya

Though the federal government is struggling to make Obamacare functional for Americans, the administration is simultaneously helping to upgrade the health-care system in Kenya.

The ambitious plan to expand health-care and social-services access to millions of Kenyans is one of several recent U.S. endeavors to surface, indicating that yet another spike in assistance to Kenya is taking place.

As U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor reported, the U.S. Agency for International Development in June 2012 alerted contractors that its Kenyan aid portfolio was growing “exponentially.”

Now, the most recent endeavor is the enhancement of an existing “five-year mission supporting the centralized health-care system in Kenya.”

In addition to heaping the cost of the programs on U.S. taxpayers, part of the plan strips responsibilities from a U.S. contractor and transfers it to a Kenyan company, according to planning documents the Monitor discovered via routine database research.

Although the Kenya Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare, or AMPATH, consortium is largely funded by international donors, the U.S. will pay for segments of its modernization. Its goal is to “expand and improve AMPATH integrated health system.”

The AMPATHplus initiative on a technical level will consolidate the organization’s various software systems into a single business management system; however, USAID also will transfer financial and administrative control of AMPATHplus “from the current American contractor to a Kenyan contractor” as it deploys this enterprise resource planning, or ERP, software system.

Kenya’s Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Moi University and partner Indiana University will retain operational control of the AMPATHplus project. But now it will do so through a management board representing those entities, the document says.

Among other targeted results, USAID is seeking contractor assistance to:

• Continue social services initiatives that AMPATHplus currently performs;
• Expand the Kenya Essential Package for Health primary care services from the current 500,000 to 750,000; and
• Develop community-based outreach workers to identify and follow up with pregnant women in a target population of 2 million people.

USAID separately launched the Kenya-based U.S. Trade and Investment Center, or TIC, a potentially $70 million initiative aiming to boost the economies of East African nations.

The agency acknowledged that the East African Community – Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda – has “one of the fastest growing economic communities in the world, growing faster than all other economic communities in the last decade.”

USAID nonetheless deems it necessary to intervene, as “the volume and variety of intra-regionally traded goods remains markedly less than those of other trading blocs” such as Europe and Asia, the TIC Statement of Work laments.

Additional obstacles to increased intra-regional trade include substandard “operational efficiency and infrastructure” of major ports in Mombasa, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Regional efforts to improve the shortcomings are underway, but USAID believes “progress has been slow.”

East African railways, likewise, are “highly inefficient and not yet competitively cost-effective with roads,” so U.S. taxpayers must help correct such impediments, according to the agency.

USAID in another Kenya-specific initiative will pour upwards of $55 million into a reading program over the next four years.

The agency last week alerted contractors about the Tusome Early Grade Reading Program, “a basic education initiative to improve the reading skills of the approximately 5.4 million individual Kenyan children who will begin primary school during the 2014-2017 school.”

Tusome, which means “Let’s Read” in Kiswahili, initially will be carried out by a contractor, but the program will “consider a transition to government ownership” in later years, according to a recently released bid request.

The Monitor recently reported that the U.S. Trade & Development Agency, an independent White House unit, awarded a $300,000 grant to help Kenyan and other East African power companies more effectively tap into the U.S. Treasury.

The USTDA grant purportedly will complement Obama’s Power Africa initiative – a multi-billion-dollar effort that is moving forward despite concerns that a new public-private bureaucracy is needed simply to overcome the pervasive corruption and incompetence of African governments and power utilities.

This article originally was published by WND (Nov. 8, 2013). Under agreement with the publisher, rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock.

Obama Can't Stop Spending — In Kenya!

The Obama administration is seeking additional U.S. taxpayer funds to provide more health services to Kenyans through a massive assistance program that has already grown so “rapidly and exponentially” the U.S. government now needs help from outside contractors to oversee it.

A Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm known for its work with the United Nations Development Program, the European Union and the World Bank has been hired by the administration to monitor, analyze and improve the foreign-assistance program, known as the Evaluation Services and Program Support endeavor.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has awarded a contract potentially worth $23 million to International Business & Technical Consultants, Inc., or IBTCI, which will provide such services when called upon.

The new arrangement allows USAID/Kenya’s Office of Population and Health Programs, or OPH, and USAID/East Africa’s Regional Health and HIV/AIDS Office, or RHH, to issue separate work orders to the consulting firm on an indefinite quantity, indefinite delivery basis.

The initiative emphasizes “Kenya is a priority country for The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and receives significant funding to address HIV/AIDS and related problems. Similarly, resources available from the President’s Malaria Initiative (PMI) assure continued funding for malaria programs.”

Despite this consistent flow of funding, Kenya wants more.

USAID says key target groups among the Kenyan population have reached plateaus or have seen declines in measurements of Kenyans’ health.

Kenya consequently intends to “seek additional funding to balance the current program to increase coverage for family planning, maternal, neonatal, and child health, nutrition/food security, and safe water and hygiene.”

USAID/East Africa similarly will enlist the consulting firm’s assistance in contributing to “the re-design of new, evidence-based follow-on projects and programs” in Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

This agency unit likewise is working “in close collaboration” with U.S. government counterparts at the Centers for Disease Control and the departments of Defense and State “to accelerate the scale-up of proven high-impact and low-cost public health programming.”

Although USAID admittedly cannot adequately manage the voluminous initiatives it has launched in Kenya, cost-wise overall aid dropped from a high of $830 million in 2009 to $460 million in 2013.

Despite the administration’s emphasis on Kenyan health programs, there is another component to the initiative: the implementation of Kenya’s new constitution, which requires greater decentralization of the national government and expansion of the county governmental system.

While the overarching goal “is to focus on the establishment of a sustainable national health system for all Kenyans,” it also must maintain “strong linkages” to other governmental and societal sectors “that impact health but have conventionally been perceived as outside of the control of the health sector.”

U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor has reported over the past year on various components of Obama’s Kenyan assistance scheme.

Those exclusive Monitor reports (some which originally appeared via WND.com and were reprinted here by the author) led USAID to eliminate public access to a critical planning document governing a U.S. propaganda initiative known as the USAID/Kenya Strategic Communications Plan 2012-2013.

Publicly available documents revealing the Obama administration’s unwieldy portfolio of Kenyan projects – which includes a formal plan to manipulate Kenyan and global media – were removed from a federal contracting database, the Monitor discovered.

The agency likewise revamped one of its solicitations for industry proposals, modifying the project to make it an East African rather than a Kenyan-only endeavor.

However, the Monitor discovered the government merely repackaged and re-released it, expanding the potential geographic reach of the initiative while limiting it to health-related projects.

USAID also plans to spend up to $50 million to strengthen Kenya’s county governments, as the Monitor previously reported.

Though the effort could help redistribute political power across the African republic, whose national government is viewed as one of the most notoriously corrupt in the world, the administration acknowledged the process may inadvertently create 47 equally corrupt county systems.

The Monitor reported Obama also is embarking upon a nationwide reading project that aims to improve the skills of children in tens of thousands of Kenyan schools.

The administration furthermore launched new peace initiatives in and around Kenya, despite acknowledging that chronic cattle rustling and other cultural practices – such as killing rivals “to prove their manhood or impress young women” – might impede progress.

USAID separately will pump hundreds of millions into contractor coffers to help improve business for farmers in and around Kenya.

This article originally was published via WND.com, and has been reprinted by the author under agreement with WND.

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Obama Can't Stop Spending — In Kenya! (WND)

My latest from WND. -- S.P.

The Obama administration is seeking additional U.S. taxpayer funds to provide more health services to Kenyans through a massive assistance program that has already grown so “rapidly and exponentially” the U.S. government now needs help from outside contractors to oversee it.

A Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm known for its work with the United Nations Development Program, the European Union and the World Bank has been hired by the administration to monitor, analyze and improve the foreign-assistance program, known as the Evaluation Services and Program Support endeavor.

The U.S. Agency for International Development has awarded a contract potentially worth $23 million to International Business & Technical Consultants, Inc., or IBTCI, which will provide such services when called upon.

Read more at WND.com...

Follow @tradeaidmonitor

Ex-Obama Employer Gets Kenyan Contract (WND)

My latest via WND. -- S.P.

Prez brings home bacon in midst of Chicago corruption probe

A no-bid contract to assess a $48 million Kenyan youth program has been awarded to the University of Chicago, where President Barack Obama taught constitutional law for 12 years.

This discovery coincides with the federal embezzlement indictment of Quinshaunta R. Golden, former key aide to Eric E. Whitaker, the one-time U. of C. Medical Center executive vice president and former colleague of Michelle Obama.

Continued at WND.com...

Follow @tradeaidmonitor

Corruption a Hurdle for Obama 'Power Africa' Plan

Bureaucracy proposed to overcome Kenyan obstacles

President Obama’s multi-billion-dollar “Power Africa” initiative aims to double citizen access to electricity and other power sources across Sub-Saharan Africa. But it plays down the creation of a new public-private bureaucracy needed to overcome the pervasive corruption and incompetence of African governments and power utilities.

A significant portion of the Kenya-based endeavor is designed simply to administer the program. Segments include efforts to sway public and congressional opinion in favor of the initiative, according to a new planning document U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor  located through routine database research.

The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, will hire a contractor or contractors primarily to persuade African officials to change regulatory governance of power distribution, explains the draft Statement of Work, or SOW. A corresponding agency goal is to encourage, with contractor assistance, the escalation of private-sector investment in the region.

This regulatory and institutional strengthening and “early stage project support” will comprise 20 percent of USAID contractor efforts.

The USAID chief of party, or COP, and deputy COP, “who will be the overall managers of the contracts,” will reserve 10 percent of program funding for those government managerial functions, the document says.

The project’s overarching goal “is to remove the power constraint to economic growth and spur trade and investment, while mitigating long-term greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions trajectories,” the draft SOW says. “Power Africa will serve as a catalyst that will spark a transformation in Africa’s energy and power sectors.

“The immediate outcome will be increased supply of and access to reliable, affordable, and sustainable power for millions of Africans and the enhanced responsible and transparent management of energy resources.”

Put in simpler terms, despite Obama’s ambitious and confident proclamations about the endeavor during his recent Africa trip, the document simultaneously affirms his vision and acknowledges the great difficulties the U.S. faces in executing such reforms.

Among other factors, the weak regulatory, policy and legal environments – made worse by continent-wide “corrupt and non-transparent bidding and contractual procedures” – serve as constraints to the sort of international investment Obama wants to bring about, the SOW says.

Political instability, a lengthy history of state-owned utilities and the “fear of change and competition” likewise deter private sector project-development and investment.

Consequently, the Obama administration expects U.S. taxpayers over the next five years to commit $7 billion toward stabilizing and correcting the investment roadblocks.

Whereas USAID will provide $285 million in technical assistance to remedy what it admits are typically corrupt and often incompetent governmental bodies and utility providers, the administration will direct the remainder of the funds through other U.S. agencies.

Among the entities are the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and the U.S. Trade & Development Agency – entities that the Cato Institute says should be “terminated” because they largely serve as monumental vehicles of “corporate welfare waste.”

Reminiscent of a prior scheme to sway journalists into providing favorable coverage of its Kenyan aid program – a document for which the agency abruptly blocked public access following this writer's coverage of the matter – the USAID prime contractor also must provide communications and outreach support that will be “directed at the American public, U.S. Congress” and elsewhere, the draft SOW says.

The previous communications plan spelled out in greater detail how the Obama administration sought to target specific journalists and media groups from whom it sought favors.

USAID designed the earlier “strategic plan” specifically for Kenyan aid programs, which had grown so large that the agency solicited more contractors to support projects already under way through other vendors.

The agency kept the program quiet for a year before repackaging it with decreased emphasis, according to publicly available documents, on the propaganda angle, as the Monitor recently reported.

According to the Power Africa draft SOW, the selected vendor must devote 20 percent of its efforts under the prime contract towards “institutional support” for the program coordinator’s office.

Communications and outreach activities represent just one component of institutional support, which also entails tracking and coordinating activities among “Power Africa implementers and stakeholders” such as other U.S. agencies, host country governments and non-governmental organizations, the document says.

Although USAID’s East Africa Regional Mission in Nairobi, Kenya, is home to the coordinator’s office, Power Africa also has plans for Ethiopia, Ghana, Liberia, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda.

This article originally was published via WND.com (July 23, 2012). Under agreement with the editor, rights have reverted back to the author, Steve Peacock.