Background Briefing On Secretary Clinton’s West Africa Trip

The Administration, since it has been in office, has placed a high priority on strengthening democratic institutions, promoting good governance, holding good, free, fair elections, and encouraging conflict reconciliation and post-conflict reconciliation and reconstruction. This trip is about all of those agendas and trying to promote them. All three of the countries that we are visiting are countries that are now a part of Africa’s democratic success story.

Our first stop in Liberia is to attend the second inauguration of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf as president of Liberia. 

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In Liberia, we have a total program of about $207 million in the last fiscal year. We also have a program to create electrical power, which is the clearest indication to a lot of people in Monrovia that, in fact, things are improving. And so we had a large program where we supported 10 megawatts of energy to the capital. In Liberia as well, we have two of the presidential initiatives – the Feed the Future program, which is designed to support agriculture, agricultural institutions, and we also have the Global Health Program, which supports programs in malaria, in child survival, in HIV/AIDS as well.