Regional Program Summary

USAID/East Africa was established in 1972 to provide technical and support services to USAID Missions and African partners in the East and Southern Africa region. The Mission, which is co-located with USAID/Kenya at the American Embassy in Nairobi, serves over a dozen countries in the region. Its purpose is to provide assistance across borders, helping countries to improve their capacity to achieve food security and boost economic growth, to better contain and prevent conflict and to improve health systems, with a special emphasis on fighting HIV/AIDS.  The regional program provides technical support to bilateral missions, ensuring that lessons learned in one country are shared.  USAID/East Africa also manages programs in countries in the region where there are no bilateral USAID Missions, providing substantial amounts of development, humanitarian and emergency assistance. The Mission also plays a key role in carrying out activities under the new Presidential Initiatives in the region and supports USAID priorities reflecting hunger alleviation and increasing global competitiveness, along with curbing corruption and building public-private alliances.

Programs

Regional Economic Growth and Integration

USAID/East Africa’s activities are aimed at reducing poverty and malnutrition, and stimulating economic growth in Africa. They focus on increasing agricultural production and facilitating trade, while improving economic policies and governance. Strengthening the capacities of African regional organizations such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Southern Africa (ASARECA) has increased the trade and export of agricultural commodities to regional and international markets. Technical assistance and training through the East and Central Africa Regional Trade Hub – which supports the President’s African Global Competitiveness Initiative - has helped African entrepreneurs to expand trade links with the United States through the African Growth Opportunities Act. Reducing barriers to trade in regional and global markets and raising rural incomes are the basic principles of two Presidential Initiatives in which USAID/East Africa is a partner: the African Global Competitiveness Initiative and the Presidential Initiative to End Hunger in Africa. Businesses receive training in marketing and product improvement and receive assistance to go to U.S. and international trade shows. As a result, in 2005, 30 companies in the region completed trade deals worth $11 million. USAID/East Africa supports efforts to improve food security in the region through the President’s Initiative to End Hunger in Africa, which increases food availability through greater agricultural productivity, better market links and improved crop varieties.

Promoting a Healthier Population in the East Africa Region

USAID/East Africa is a regional leader in health and HIV/AIDS programs. The programs have a number of aims, including increasing the sharing of information and the transfer of technology, building African capacity to manage and treat health-related problems, and providing state of the art technical assistance. In addition, USAID/East Africa is focused on promoting best practices in health and collaborating with donors and others to deliver and monitor health and HIV/AIDS programs. Health activities deal with HIV/AIDS and infectious diseases, child health and nutrition, maternal/neonatal health and nutrition, combating Avian Influenza and other health vulnerabilities. For the foreseeable future, the HIV/AIDS pandemic will continue to have a major and devastating impact on development - across all sectors - throughout the region. USAID/East Africa has contributed to worldwide efforts to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS by developing an innovative, multi-sectoral approach to reducing the impact of the pandemic in the region. This approach directly supports the achievement of the goals and objectives articulated in President Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief. Because urgent health problems such as Avian Influenza and HIV/AIDS do not respect borders, USAID’S regional Health and HIV/AIDS activities assist countries to tackle challenges that bilateral programs alone cannot.

Mitigating Conflict and Supporting Peace 

USAID/East Africa’s activities focus on the pressing problems of peace keeping in the Great Lakes region of Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi and in the Horn of Africa region which includes Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Djibouti and Somalia. USAID works systematically through regional, national and local partners to address distinctly different external factors that lead to conflict in the resource rich (Great Lakes) and resource poor (Horn of Africa) cross-border environments and corruption-prone corridors. Special focus is placed on remote areas where government presence is minimal and other areas that are under threat from militant and violent extremism. USAID provides technical assistance, training and community infrastructure, helping to accelerate peace processes, promote reconciliation and alleviate points of cross-border tensions. Innovative local level peace-building initiatives address the major sources of fragility in the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa.

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