$130 Million for "African" health

The newest article in the New York Times is titled Africa: $130 Million from the United States to Train Doctors in a Dozen Countries. For all of you human-rights concerned science or healthcare concerned students out there, this should come as a shock for you. Not the $130 part--the million part. The whole time i read this article, all i could think it what is the continent of Africa going to do with $130 million, build 20 hospitals and be able to pay their staff for 5 years?

The article promotes Obama's generous donation, coming from the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, as a significant gesture. Most of this money will be going towards combating the "brain drain" currently occuring in many countries in Africa by supplementing the salaries of doctors, supporting exchanges between doctors in the United States and various African countries, providing scholarships for "students from poor families" and technology that will let medical students present cases from remote locations.

After this sentence, questions should be running through your head like how can $130 million support ALL of these ambitions in 12 countries? The answer is, it cannot. A better question, how will the money be distributed--through local health NGOs, the WHO, the government? And if it is the government, we must ask who will really be benefiting from this money; my prediction is the urban hospitals of Nairobi and Dar Es Saalam, not the district hospitals in rural parts of Ghana.

This may seem critical, but I do applaud any effort towards improving the health care systems of some of these health-devastated countries, ridden with larger problems than the United States like an AIDS epidemic, chronic schistosomiasis problems and malaria. It is better to do something rather than nothing.

Food for thought.