The United States is proud of its long-standing partnership with the nations of Africa, based upon mutual interests, shared democratic values and a decades-long commitment to improving the lives of the African people.
Much of our cooperation deals with aid delivery. In partnership with more than 120 countries, the U.S. Government is working to help defeat the COVID-19 pandemic. USAID takes the lead in this effort, in tandem with the State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Defense, and others as part of an All-of-America response to support health systems, humanitarian assistance, and economic, security, and stabilization efforts.
“It's important to note that this assistance is aligned across the three key core objectives of the president's Africa strategy,” said Assistant Administrator for Africa Chris Maloney:
“The first objective being advancing trade and commercial ties with key African states to increase American and African prosperity. The second is protecting the United States from cross-border health and security threats. The third is supporting African states as progress towards stability, citizen responsive governance, and also what we call the drive to self-reliance here at USAID.”
“It's important to flag that, right now, we find ourselves also confronting COVID-19,” he said:”
" And I'm excited to report that today we've committed close to 350 million dollars to help countries across sub-Saharan Africa respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The tens of billions of dollars that the United States has invested over the past decades, particularly through PEPFAR and the President’s Malaria Initiative, has created incredible trust-based relationships for us across Africa, said Assistant Administrator Maloney:
“One thing that I think has been exciting is, for example, in South Africa, we've had the ability to leverage about 20,000 health care workers working traditionally on the PEPFAR platform, so the anti-AIDS platform now pivots to work on COVID.”
“This ability to leverage these platforms that we've been able to develop in a covered space has been very, very important in our response,” said Assistant Administrator Maloney.
“I'm confident that our relationships and the shared experiences that we've had with our African country partners over the past decades will continue to help us meet both today's COVID-19 crisis and the broader development issues at hand, head on.”
