The funding pledge was made amid U.S. efforts to counter China’s growing influence on the African continent.
President Joe Biden has pledged more than $1 billion in humanitarian support for sub-Saharan African nations as he seeks to strengthen ties in the region to counter China’s growing influence.
Biden announced the commitment on Dec. 3 while in Angola for what is expected to be his final trip abroad as president.
“The United States continues to be the world’s largest provider of humanitarian aid and development assistance,“ Biden said outside of Angola’s National Museum of Slavery in Belas. ”That’s going to increase. You know, that’s the right thing for the wealthiest nation in the world to do.
“And today, I’m announcing over $1 billion of new humanitarian support for Africans displaced from homes by historic droughts and food insecurity.”
Data compiled by the Geneva, Switzerland-based Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre indicate that the number of displaced people across the African continent increased sixfold from 2009 to 2023, rising to 6.3 million from 1.1 million.
In Angola, some 79,000 people were displaced by natural disasters last year.
Biden’s remarks followed a bilateral meeting with Angolan President Joao Lourenco in the nation’s capital, Luanda.
The visit to Angola was the first by a sitting U.S. president and is meant to underscore the U.S. commitment to bolstering infrastructure and development in the region.
On Dec. 4, Biden will visit Lobito to spotlight a railway project, for which the United States has committed $3 billion to counter China’s development projects across the African continent.
Once complete, the Lobito Corridor will connect the Atlantic port city to Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where critical minerals for lithium batteries, such as copper and cobalt, are mined.
The initiative is meant to make it easier to export those minerals while increasing the U.S. presence and influence in Africa.
Roughly 70 percent of the world’s cobalt is sourced from Congo, and about 80 percent of the country’s cobalt mines are owned and operated by Chinese companies.
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