As released from the White House yesterday, Obama will visit Accra, Ghana, on July 10 and 11. It will be his first trip to the sub-Sahara Africa as U.S. president. (His first trip to the African continent as U.S. president will be to Egypt in June.)

From the May 16 “White House Release on Upcoming Obama Travel:

“The President and Mrs. Obama will visit Accra, Ghana, from July 10 to 11. While in Ghana, the President will discuss a range of bilateral and regional issues with Ghanaian President Mills. The President and Mrs. Obama look forward to strengthening the U.S. relationship with one of our most trusted partners in sub-Saharan Africa, and to highlighting the critical role that sound governance and civil society play in promoting lasting development.”

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Yesterday, former President Bill Clinton announced an upcoming trip to Ethiopia, Rwanda, Liberia and Senegal to promote the Clinton Foundation’s new programs to fight AIDS and malaria. Earlier this month, the Clinton Foundation “reached an agreement with several pharmaceutical companies to slash the price of the top anti-malaria treatment by 30 percent.”(AFP)

President Clinton travels to Africa once a year and his first trip was while he was president in 1998. Due to ONE members’ “Visit Africa” campaign in February, both Senators McCain and Obama have pledged, that if they’re elected, they’ll visit the continent during their presidency. Check out their pledges here.

The 100,000 “Visit Africa” petitions have been delivered and we’ve heard back from the candidates.

After you check out the candidates’ responses, take a few minutes and write a letter to the editor of your local paper. Writing a letter to the editor is your chance to talk about the poverty-fighting successes highlighted on the recent presidential trip to Africa – successes ONE members have helped make possible – and our campaign urging the next president to visit Africa in his or her first term.

-Aaron Banks

For Americans, and especially our next president, President Bush’s trip to Africa last week wasn’t a victory lap. It’s a starting line. A challenge. The opening, not the closing, of a legacy in which medicine and health diplomacy serve as a currency for peace.

The trip demonstrated for the next president, whoever that may be, the tremendous opportunity that awaits in Africa. Yes, there is much work to do, and we are still confronted by staggering realities: More than 24.7 million people still have HIV/AIDS in Africa alone; thousands still die from malaria each day, and more than one billion people worldwide still don’t have access to clean water.

But never before have we had the tools we now possess to do this vital work – the medicines and technologies that are saving lives as you read these words have never been so inexpensive and so readily available. When you think about it, it’s amazing that AIDS drugs now cost as little as $1 a day . . . that a mosquito net can now protect a child from malaria for five years for $5 . . . that a well can provide clean, safe drinking water for 20 years at a cost of only $20 a person.
And never before have we had so many answers to the doubts of the past, the criticisms that dominated the debate over the effectiveness of American foreign assistance for a generation. Many of the old presumptions about Africa and other developing regions have been proved wrong, addressed through transparency and accountability, or dismissed by new approaches and 21st century technologies.

Last week President Bush visited some of the HIV-positive men, women, and children in poverty-stricken communities who are living today because of American-funded medicines. To date, around 1.4 million Africans now receive anti-retroviral pills through the president’s AIDS initiative.

Want to see health diplomacy making a difference? Want to see medicine serving as a currency for peace? Stare into the eyes of a mother whose daughter is alive thanks to America.

Critics once said that investing in Africa was worse than throwing money away, that the dollars would find their way into corrupt leaders’ bank accounts and perpetuate poverty. But the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) has changed the way America provides foreign assistance, attacking corruption head on by engaging leaders to take the difficult steps toward government reform, accountability, and transparency.

Just last week the president signed the largest MCA grant ever, a $698 million agreement with Tanzania. More than merely sending dollars, the MCA ensures that American assistance not only reaches those it’s designed to help, but that it’s setting structures in place – the rule of law, freer economic policies – for African countries to thrive on their own.
Last week we saw what American compassion and leadership can look like when invested in proven, effective solutions we know work.

I hope our next president is paying attention. I hope he or she sees the power of American health diplomacy, of using medicine as a currency for peace: the power to save lives, to lead under the guiding principles of compassion and human dignity.

We have the science. We can afford the pills and bed nets and wells. We have answers to the classic criticisms of the past. The question that remains is simple: Do we have the will to employ all this know-how, all these answers to help countless people throughout the world?

That sounds like a question for our next president.

-Former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, M.D.

More than 100,000 ONE members have signed ONE Action’s “Visit Africa” petition.

Send it to a friend to keep the momentum going.

In just a week and a half, 97,220 ONE members have signed ONE Action’s “Visit Africa” petition.

We’re hoping to reach 100,00 by Monday at noon.

Sign on now if you haven’t already.

And send on to your friends if you have.

-Virginia Simmons

In just one week, more than 67,000 ONE members have signed ONE Action’s “Visit Africa” petition.

Sign on if you haven’t already.

Reuters: Bush offers more aid to fight malaria in Africa

On the third day of his five-nation Africa tour, Bush travelled to this northern Tanzanian city in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro to focus attention on the mosquito-borne disease, which kills at least 1 million infants and children under age 5 in sub-Saharan Africa each year.

“For years malaria has been a health crisis in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease keeps sick workers home, school yards quiet, communities in mourning,” he said during a visit to Meru District Hospital. “The suffering caused by malaria is needless and every death caused by malaria is unacceptable.”

Calling the effort to help fight malaria in Africa a “campaign of compassion”, Bush announced a new plan, in partnership with the World Bank, to distribute 5.2 million insecticide-treated bed nets in Tanzania.

He said the campaign, which will begin within six months, will provide enough nets to protect every child in Tanzania between the ages of 1 and 5.

(Read full story)

The Independent UK: Popular in Africa: Bush has given more aid than any other US president

The US President’s visit to Benin, Liberia, Ghana, Rwanda and Tanzania may, on the surface, be about promoting America’s funding for Aids treatment, shoring up support for a US military base on the continent, and quietly scoping out new oil opportunities. But there is another, perhaps more important, reason for President Bush’s week-long visit to Africa: people actually like him here.

A recent report from the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that “the US image is much stronger in Africa than in other regions of the world”. At least 80 per cent of respondents in Ghana, Kenya and Cote d’Ivoire were favourable to the US. In all other sub-Saharan African countries polled, there were more “favourables” than “non-favourables”. Part of the reason for that support is money. Lots of it.

(Read full story.)

Later today, President Bush heads to Africa to visit five countries — Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia. Here at ONE, we are going to watch this trip closely and try to provide you with unique insight and analysis. We’ll have voices from Africa, from Capitol Hill, and from people on the ground providing aid to the African people. We will provide policy briefings for each day of the trip. And ONE will be part of the trip, with our team on the ground in Rwanda and Ghana providing their first-hand views of what’s happening.

This is an exciting moment. In large part because of the advocacy work done by ONE members and other organizations involved in the fight to save lives, President Bush and the Congress have made major strides.

The number of Africans surviving HIV/AIDS thanks to life-saving medical treatment has increased ten-fold.

There are 4.7 million bed nets protecting African children from malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

There are more jobs and greater opportunities, especially for women and families to break away from the cycle of brutal, extreme poverty.

And there are new governments who are working hard to increase democracy and opportunity for their people in countries like Liberia, where President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has made transparency and accountability a driving force in her government reform plan. ONE members played a big part in winning the cancellation of Liberia’s debt by the IMF just a few months ago.

These are major improvements of which we can all be proud. But none of us should be satisfied.

President Bush’s trip to Africa is an opportunity to take a hard look at what still remains to accomplish. Yes, we have achieved a great deal, but 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africans continue to live on less than $2 a day. Experts report that, last year alone, 35 percent of all people living globally with HIV lived in Southern Africa, where 32 percent of all global new HIV infections and AIDS deaths occurred. Tens of millions of people still go hungry each day. In this region alone,13,150 children under age 5 died from preventable childhood diseases and malnutrition.

While in 2000 the U.S. joined 188 other countries to sign onto the Millennium Development Goals, we are falling behind in reaching their 2015 targets.

A few days ago, we asked you to lend your voice to a new challenge for the candidates, calling on them to visit Africa and see first-hand the opportunities and the challenges that people in those countries face. Already, more than 52,000 people have signed that petition, and we are not finished yet. In the next few days, we will take these petitions and deliver them to the presidential candidates, and see if they are willing to step up and make fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease a real priority. If you haven’t signed the petition, add your voice today.

Check back each day as we chronicle President Bush’s trip to Africa. And let us know your thoughts. Join the discussion here on the ONE Blog.

-David Lane, CEO and President of ONE

“President Bush has every reason to be proud of what he and so many others have accomplished in Africa. From AIDS treatment once thought impossible, to millions of bednets to keep kids from dying of a mosquito bite, to new African jobs created with trade policy, to billions in old debts erased. And back in Washington, a political shift has taken place with Democrats and Republicans working shoulder to shoulder to partner with the people of Africa as they work to lift their continent out of poverty, putting 29 million children in school in the last five years, with the help of debt cancellation.  These are accomplishments the next President must build on.  It’s true that American generosity is on the rise, but it’s also true that despite recent set backs in Kenya, there’s a new Africa to match it.  I hope that the next President, whoever that is, will get to experience first hand this beautiful and entrepreneurial continent that is rising to all of the challenges being sent its way. 

I do regret that the current President and First Lady can’t escape the constant nagging of Irish rock stars, whether at home or abroad… He’s apparently picked one up on this trip too.”