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

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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U.S. Seeks New Means of Predicting Internet Growth Overseas, from Albania to Zimbabwe

The U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) is looking for a contractor capable of developing a new analytical model to predict Internet usage and growth in thirty-two foreign nations, from "A" (Albania) to "Z" (Zimbabwe).

The agency, which runs U.S. government-funded international broadcasting systems such as Voice of America and Radio Sawa and Alhurra Television of the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, said in a Statement of Work (Solicitation #BBG50-R-11-0020) that existing models for predicting growth are inadequate. The SOW said those models solely focus on specific technology sectors rather than the Internet in its entirety:

The ultimate goal is to estimate, using empirical data, the expansion of the number of unique individuals using the Internet on a weekly basis in these markets over the next five years. While various organizations have produced such estimates and prejections for sub-segments of the Internet market, such as mobile Internet use or fixed line broadband, BBG requires estimates of the growth of the entire Internet market, regardless of platform, including use via public access facilities.

Although the BBG attempted to justifiy why it wants a new predictive model, it did not specify why it needs -- nor what it intends to do -- with such a new mode of analysis. The agency said it would apply the model to Internet usage in the following nations: Afghanistan, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, China, Egypt, Georgia, Ghana, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Serbia, Syria, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, Vietnam,  Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

The BBG said the selected contractor should be able to complete the work within an eight-week period. It did not offer an estimated cost of the project.

USAID Launching Education Project in Zambia, Despite 'Socio-cultural' Roadblocks

The federal government recently called on contractors for assistance in launching a public schools project to heighten teacher accountability and to improve student outcomes—in the African nation of Zambia.

Despite acknowledging major cultural obstacles to attaining improvements in that nation’s school system, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is embarking upon a $25 million project that largely will be conducted by private sector vendors. According to a Request for Proposals (RFP #611-2011-04) that U.S. Trade & Aid Monitor located through routine database research, USAID said that the participation of boys and girls alike in their educations is constrained by Zambia’s “strong socio-cultural norms.”

The agency pointed out that in one Zambian province “boys are expected to become ‘men’ when they reach puberty. Being a ‘man’ includes earning an income through fishing and supporting a family.” Girls in that particular province “are forced into early marriages because parents abdicate their responsibility of looking after them.”

In another province “initiation ceremonies keep boys out of the schools in the winter months as they are secluded for circumcision.” Additionally, “early” marriages—which the agency did not define and presumably placed in the context of American norms—are common across the entire nation.

“Boys in some parts of Eastern and Southern province spend much of their childhood herding cattle and only enter Grade 1 when they are teenagers,” USAID continued. “In Western Province, the practice of migrating from the high ground to the lower plains for agricultural reasons has left schools completely abandoned, as children move with their parents.”

Due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Zambian society views orphans as social outcasts and are “denied opportunities to continue their education.”

Nonetheless, USAID is looking for contractors capable of grooming future teachers and educational leaders, improving Zambia’s use of effective student assessment tools, and provide “guidance and counseling support services” particularly to girls, 15,500 of whom were reported pregnant in 2009.

“The purpose of the Improved School Effectiveness Program,” according to USAID, “is to assist the Zambian Ministry of Education to implement school-level management reforms to improve learner outcomes.”