New Power in Africa
Chinese Entrepreneurs Flourish in Africa
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.
What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.
“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.
Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.
Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.
During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.
Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.
At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.
Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.
Chinese Expansion
You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”
Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.
His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.
Mr. You’s partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era now. There’s a flight to China every day.”
The pickup in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.
Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.
One of the largest road builders, China Road and Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.
On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.
Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.
“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”
In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.
“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”
Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.
Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”
Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.
In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.
“After a day off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,” said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here.
African Ambivalence
Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.
“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are unbelievable.”
When the salesman finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us again,” one said.
After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did you sleep last night?”
One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.
“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”
Howard W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.
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( 3 / 267 )A series of articles regarding China in Africa
August 13, 2007
China, Filling a Void, Drills for Riches in Chad
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN
KOUDJIWAI, Chad — The small plane flew in low over a scorched, peppercorn scrubland, following a broad, muddy river that was all elbows on its run to the southeast.
The first hint of humanity came with the appearance of an immense grid for seismic testing, laboriously traced through the brush. Finally, a lonely, hulking steel drilling platform popped into view.
Chad is as geographically isolated as places come in Africa. It is also among the continent’s poorest and least stable countries, the scene of recurrent civil wars and foreign invasions since it gained independence from France in 1960.
None of that has put off the Chinese, though. In January, they bought the rights to a vast exploration zone that surrounds this rural village, making the baked wilderness here, without roads, electricity or telephones, the latest frontier for their thirsty oil industry and increasingly global ambitions.
The same is happening in one African country after another. In large oil-exporting countries like Angola and Nigeria, China is building or fixing railroads, and landing giant exploration contracts in Congo and Guinea.
In mineral-rich countries that had been all but abandoned by foreign investors because of unrest and corruption, Chinese companies are reviving output of cobalt and bauxite. China has even become the new mover and shaker in agricultural countries like Ivory Coast, once the crown jewel in France’s postcolonial African empire, where Chinese companies are building a new capital, in Yamoussoukro, paid for by Chinese loans.
Surging Chinese interest in this continent has helped bring about what many Africans believe is the most important moment since the end of the cold war, when democracy was spreading in Africa and Western nations spoke of a “peace dividend” that might ease African poverty.
That blush of interest in Africa quickly faded, though, as did several of the new democracies, and Africans and Westerners have regarded each other warily ever since. Westerners complain about chronic corruption and ineffective government, while Africans lament broken promises on aid and a hostile international economic system.
The Chinese have stepped into this picture, coming to struggling countries like Chad with deep pockets, fewer demands on how African governments should behave and an avowed faith in everyone’s ability to prosper.
As Beijing’s ambassador to this country, Wang Yingwu, said at his residence in Ndjamena, Chad’s capital, where the electricity repeatedly failed, “We are exempting Chadian goods from import duties.” When the interviewer noted that Chad produced almost nothing besides oil, Mr. Wang was undaunted, saying, “If they don’t produce things today, they will tomorrow.”
To help make that happen, China plans to build the country’s first oil refinery, lay new roads, provide irrigation and erect a mobile telephone network, for starters.
With such intensive efforts across the continent, China’s trade with Africa topped $55 billion in 2006, up from less than $10 million in the 1980s. To achieve this growth, it has bypassed multinational institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and flouted many of their lending criteria, including minimum standards of transparency, open bidding for contracts, environmental impact studies and assessments of overall debt and fiscal policies.
In some ways, the new Chinese model of doing business in Africa is a throwback to an earlier era of Western involvement that is now widely seen as disastrous. In that era, borrowing countries typically had to work with companies from the lending nation, limiting competition and giving priority to business over development. Today, China takes things even further, signing long-term deals for rights to natural resources that allow countries otherwise unworthy of credit to repay their debt in oil or mineral output.
“In what manner has Africa progressed, in what sector?” said the Chadian president, Idriss Déby, referring to decades of close ties to the West. “Whatever the good will of Africa’s old friends and the old partners in its development, it has not progressed at all.”
Still, major doubts hang heavily in the air. Will China’s hunger for raw materials enable this continent to take off? Or will Beijing’s willingness to spend whatever it needs in Africa, without regard to fiscal prudence, democracy, honest business practices and human rights, produce a replay of booms past, enriching local elites but leaving the continent poorer, its environment despoiled and its natural resources depleted?
A Test Case for China
There are few better places than Chad to watch for signs of how China’s African gambit will pay off. Chad ranks just four places from the bottom on the United Nations scale of human development, yet it is emerging as a critical piece in China’s economic push in a broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa, beginning with Sudan and extending in virtually every direction.
Despite advanced prospecting by French and other Western firms dating back to the 1970s, Chad’s oil had never been tapped. The nation was simply too unstable and the price of oil too low to justify investing much here. The oil that had been found was of low quality, and there was no practical way to get it out.
That changed in 2000, when the World Bank agreed to help finance a $4.2 billion, 665-mile pipeline connecting Chad to Cameroon on the condition that oil revenues be used to fight poverty.
Chad’s revenues quickly outstripped expectations, but have not gone into quelling its immense poverty. Mismanagement and fraud have beset the World Bank plan from the start.
Beyond that, Chadian rebels with bases in Sudan have been trying to depose Mr. Déby, so he pressed the World Bank to relax its rules on how to spend the country’s oil money. A compromise was reached, and he went on a military spending spree, buying guns, aircraft and armored vehicles for his troops, along with a fleet of armored Humvees that stop traffic as they zoom about Ndjamena’s dusty, potholed streets.
Seeking an even freer hand with the country’s oil bonanza, Mr. Déby’s government also hinted that it could find other partners willing to invest in Chad, especially with the price of oil so high.
Then, in 2006, Chad ended a relationship with Taiwan and recognized mainland China, and the floodgates opened. China bought the rights to several oil exploration zones in the country from a Canadian company and has gone from bit player to center stage in Chad’s affairs, confident that it can wring smart profits from the most inhospitable conditions.
“The Canadians and the Americans are only interested in really big finds,” said a veteran Western oil production engineer who works under contract here for the China National Petroleum Company, the C.N.P.C. “Anything else they think is not worth their time. The Chinese have a different approach. They are happy with the smaller finds, just lots of them. “They seem to have a different time frame, too,” the engineer added. “They plan to be here for a while.”
Indeed, the Chinese dream in this region consists of making finds here and there, using the World Bank financed pipeline to transport the oil and eventually building new pipelines to connect with a Chinese-built grid in Sudan.
This vision requires not only finding more oil, but establishing peace between Chad and Sudan. Darfur, the chaotic western Sudanese region where at least 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million been displaced in a government-backed counterinsurgency campaign, lies next to China’s exploration zones. Human rights groups maintain that Chinese weapons have played a major role in the carnage in Darfur.
Beijing’s recent diplomatic activity in the region may be explained by these Chinese oil interests as much as by American pressure on China to help stop the killing in Darfur.
“It used to be that when we had problems with our neighbor sending mercenaries to invade us that none of our complaints before the United Nations would pass, because China blocked them,” said President Déby. Since breaking relations with Taiwan and opening the door to Chinese investment, he added, “we have been able to raise our concerns without taboo.”
One topic that neither side was willing to say much about was the World Bank’s foundering efforts to ensure that petroleum revenues were well spent here. “I know the current pipeline is part of a project involving the World Bank and Esso,” said Dou Lirong, the general manager of C.N.P.C. International in Chad, calling the authority over revenues “a very complicated” matter. “I don’t know too much about it,” Mr. Dou continued, “but I’ve read a little bit on the Web.”
In fact, the very idea of the World Bank project is anathema to China’s deeply held noninterference policy, which has for decades governed China’s foreign policy and development. Underlying both is a kind of golden rule — China considers other countries meddling in its affairs unacceptable, and it assumes its friends feel the same way.
Cao Zhongming, deputy director of the Department of African Affairs, in the Chinese Foreign Ministry said: “China won’t interfere with Chad’s internal affairs. As a policy, that doesn’t change. If C.N.P.C., World Bank and Chad reach an agreement, it’s between them.” But, he added, if Chad does not accept the World Bank arrangement, “neither C.N.P.C. or the Chinese government would impose it.”
“The Chinese government,” he said, “won’t enforce something that Chad thinks interferes with their internal affairs.”
To China’s new African allies, this notion is a breath of fresh air. After years of hewing to the latest fads in international development doled out by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Western donors and the United Nations, African governments have grown weary of the strings attached to foreign aid.
Thérèse Mekombe, vice chairwoman of the committee that monitors Chad’s oil money to make sure it is used properly, expressed surprise about the Chinese executive’s uncertainty about how oil revenues would be handled. Brandishing a copy of the law, she said all of the country’s oil earnings fell under the control of the World Bank arrangement. “The Chinese need to understand that they cannot arrive in a country and just impose their way of thinking,” Ms. Mekombe said.
A ‘Win-Win’ Business Plan
Chinese officials almost invariably describe their relationship with African countries as a win-win — based on mutual respect, aimed at joint prosperity and free of the overtones of exploitation and paternalism that critics worldwide say have governed much of the West’s postcolonial relationship with Africa.
China plans to build a petroleum refinery and a cement factory in Chad, both desperately needed in a landlocked country forced to import basic goods. Indeed, lowering gas and cement prices, which are among the highest in Africa, could do more to reduce poverty than the efforts of the World Bank and other donors combined, Mr. Dou suggested. “We can make a contribution to Chad,” he said.
Asked for an example of what win-win relationships look like, Mr. Dou offered what might seem an unlikely choice: Sudan. In its capital, Khartoum, he said, signs of China’s impact are everywhere.
“If you go to Sudan, you see paved roads,” he said. In the past, “the cars in Sudan had no turn signals, they point directions by hand. Now there are many good cars.”
Asked whether the oil money was really benefiting the Sudanese people, not just their rulers, Mr. Dou replied: “It is difficult for me to say. I am an engineer.”
To some critics, the answer is clear. “China’s no-strings-attached approach is problematic, particularly if its effect, if not its intent, is to undermine others’ efforts to change situations on the ground,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Often what is happening,” he added, “is underwriting of repression.”
Few Benefits for the People
Even with binding arrangements governing the use of oil revenues, Chad’s people have largely missed out.
In the Mayo-Kébbi region, where much of China’s feverish oil exploration is happening, the city of Bongor hardly looks like the capital of the booming oil region it is set to become. Along its tree-fringed main avenue, the briskest business is preparing the city’s signature dish — a chicken so scrawny it can be grilled whole in a few minutes.
At the lone hospital, a moldering colonial-era structure, a handful of workers tended to dozens of patients suffering from the classic ailments of poverty: hunger, diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, pneumonia. Civil servants were on strike, seeking to force the government, which according to World Bank estimates will collect $1.2 billion in oil money this year, to increase their meager salaries.
Pauline Maratangou, a 53-year-old midwife, did show up to work, and it was a good thing. Half a dozen pregnant women with bellies fit to burst patiently awaited her services.
“Vas-y, vas-y, vas-y!” she cooed, urging an 18-year-old mother to push. The maternity ward had only a padded bench for deliveries and no stirrups. The floors and walls were caked with dirt — the orderlies were on strike. Ms. Maratangou worked with quick, efficient motions, pouring iodine over the crown of the baby’s head as it emerged, trying to keep mother and child free of infection.
At last a little boy popped out, his head slightly misshapen, like a peanut shell.
“Ah, he’s a handsome boy,” she said, holding him aloft, feet first, waiting for his first bellowing cries. There was only time to snip his umbilical cord, weigh him — five and a half pounds, not too bad for this part of the world — and swaddle him in rags before the next mother, also 18, was ready to hop on the table still slick with afterbirth slime.
The grim conditions help explain why Chad has among the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. One of every five children will die before age 5.
“We hear that our country has oil, but we see no evidence of it here,” said Ms. Maratangou, the midwife.
Officials in Bongor say money from Chinese investments could fix schools and hospitals, or provide jobs and new roads. Under Chadian law, 5 percent of the oil revenue is supposed to go back to the community where the oil was drilled.
“We have very high hopes,” said Khalifa Malloum, the secretary general of Bongor’s regional government. “If the West does not want to invest in us, let the Chinese come. We welcome them. They don’t tell us what to do and they bring development. They are good partners.”
But Limassou Saleh, a community organizer in Bongor, said he was deeply skeptical. “Chad is maybe the most corrupt country in the world,” Mr. Saleh said. “We have a long history of human rights violations, of lack of transparency, of exploitation. China has a reputation for corruption. They are one of the worst human rights abusers. They have no record of transparency. What would we want with a country like that? Only to make our own problems worse.”
Fan Wenxin contributed reporting from Shanghai.
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( 3 / 259 )Irish student arrested for 'mooning' at house of Senegalese governor
By James Macintyre
Published: 14 August 2007
An Irish student has spent almost three weeks locked up in Senegal after being caught allegedly flashing his bottom in a dare outside the home of one of the country's governors.
Patrick Devine, 19, from the seaside village of Dunfanaghy, Co Donegal, was arrested last month after dropping his trousers and "pulling a mooner" outside the residence.
Mr Devine is an engineering student at Queen's University, Belfast. He had travelled to the west African state earlier this summer in a group from the Teaching and Projects Abroad (TPA) scheme to work with street children.
The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that staff from the embassy in neighbouring Nigeria had been working to secure his release.
The Irish Foreign Affairs minister, Dermot Ahern, said yesterday: "It is a very unfortunate case. Staff in the department are doing their level best and we are also liaising with EU member states and other countries who have embassies in Senegal."
Mr Devine was arrested on 27 July after a local man saw the prank and held him and other members of the group until police arrived. He has been in custody since. After several days in police cells he was moved to the prison La Maison de la Correction.
Mr Devine's father, Patsy, who runs a pub in the family's home town, declined to comment.
Despite the seriousness of the unfortunate teenager's predicament, messages on his Bebo internet page were making light of the incident. One said: "I just wanna say you earned my total respect by pulling that mooner. I'm sure the Senegalese thought a lunar eclipse was happening when they saw that big white arse of yours."
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( 3 / 308 )Senegal anti-mutilation group wins US prize
A Senegalese educational group fighting the tradition of female genital mutilation in Africa won a 1.5-million prize from the Conrad Hilton humanitarian foundation, the fund said Tuesday.
The independent foundation awarded its annual Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Prize to Tostan, a group which educates people about the harmful practice, plus other social and health issues.
Through an education program in local languages, Tostan has "achieved major breakthroughs, empowering women and improving the lives of millions of people in nine African countries," the foundation said in a statement.
"Villages have reduced infant and maternal mortality, ended domestic violence, improved community health services and nutrition, and provided education for their children."
About two million girls are subjected to the circumcision procedure each year, most of them in Africa, the Hilton statement said. Many religious believers hold it to be a duty under Islam and Christianity.
It can cause death through hemorrhaging and later complications during childbirth. It also carries risks of infection, urinary tract problems and mental trauma.
Tostan's work has led more than 2,600 villages to renounce the practice and also ended the practice of child marriages, the Hilton foundation said.
Tostan's founder Molly Melching will be handed the prize on September 13th.
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( 2.7 / 319 )FLIGHT COURSE
How U.N. Food Organization
Improves Africa's Air Safety
Humanitarian Efforts
Prompt New Standards
at Crash-Prone Carriers
By DANIEL MICHAELS
August 15, 2007; Page A1
NAIROBI, Kenya -- Africa accounts for less than 5% of global air traffic, but about 25% of the world's plane crashes.
Flying is so dangerous that it even impaired the United Nations World Food Program's efforts to deliver aid to suffering populations around the continent. After a spate of crashes killed several WFP workers, the agency five years ago ordered a broad review of safety conditions on its flights.
[airplane being repaired]1
Daniel Michaels
A U.N. plane undergoes repairs and safety checks at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, Kenya.
Today, the WFP is delivering more than food in Africa's most troubled countries. By holding contractors to high standards on maintenance and flight operations, it is helping to avoid accidents at the small carriers it hires for humanitarian flights. The rigor WFP officials impose on their contractors is in turn feeding back to the national aviation regulators who oversee those operators. As a result, it is helping improve air safety across the continent.
"The WFP is lifting the bar for everyone," says Njuguna Mungai, director of operations at Kenyan commercial airline ALS Ltd. and a former official at the Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority.
Making Africa's skies safer means more than saving lives in a continent already ravaged by war and disease. Air travel is the only transport option for people and goods across much of Africa because roads, rail networks and waterways don't exist in many places.
AIR LIFT
• The Issue: Aviation is vital to Africa, but suffers from poor safety due to poverty, corruption and weak regulation.
• What's Changing: The U.N.'s World Food Program has set strict operational standards for carriers it hires. This rigor is feeding back to national regulators throughout Africa.
• The Bottom Line: The WFP's work in Africa and global stature gives it strong influence. WFP air-safety officials want to work as a catalyst for tighter standards across the continent.
At the root of Africa's dismal air-safety record are low investment, crumbling infrastructure and lax national authorities. Across much of the continent, there is minimal air-traffic control or regulation, and pilots often fly without basic navigational aids like radar. National air authorities in many impoverished sub-Saharan states struggle to pay their bills, retain good staff and meet the minimal air-safety standards set by the U.N.'s International Civil Aviation Organization.
In some lawless regions, almost anyone with an airplane can fly with no oversight. In countries like Sudan and Congo, unpaved airstrips often double as soccer fields where children mark goal posts with piles of rocks -- into which planes hurtle upon landing -- according to WFP safety officials.
"The air-safety record in Africa is worrisome," says Harold Demuren, director of the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, who is becoming a leading voice for air safety in Africa.
According to Airclaims Ltd., a London aviation consulting firm, Africa has suffered roughly six fatal accidents per million passenger and cargo flights since 2000, compared with under 0.3 per million in North America, where skies and airports are far more congested.
Africa's record is probably even worse than the data indicate because tallies don't include planes seating fewer than 15 people -- the type of aircraft that comprise most of Africa's fleet. National air regulators in much of sub-Saharan Africa lack funds to track these small planes and their accident rates.
[Cesar Arroyo]
"Around 500 flights take off each day in Africa. Nobody knows what they are or where they are going...and people are dying," says Cesar Arroyo, a former fighter pilot from Peru who is spearheading the WFP's air-safety efforts.
The U.N. began thinking about air safety when its aid efforts in Africa grew to unprecedented scope amid humanitarian crises in Angola, Ethiopia and Sudan in the 1990s. As the number of war victims and refugees needing shelter, food and medicine surged, U.N. agencies began chartering planes from across Africa, the former Soviet Union, the Middle East or wherever they were available around the world.
U.N. officials usually hired the lowest-priced carriers, often through brokers. They generally knew little about the safety record or the quality of equipment and crews of the hired planes.
On many U.N.-chartered flights, crews received little training or oversight, and planes flew overloaded. Pilots worked far longer than the 100 hours per month that regulators world-wide generally allow, aviation officials say.
"Pilots would think, 'If I don't fly, I'll lose my job,' " says Capt. George Kamau, chief pilot at Kenyan carrier East African Safari Air Express, who flew cargo in Somalia during the 1990s.
The dangers of such badly regulated flights gradually became clear. In June 1998, a top U.N. official in Angola and seven others were killed when their small plane crashed in the Ivory Coast due to pilot errors, according to South African investigators.
Months later, when Mr. Arroyo was running WFP aid flights in Angola, which was in the grips of civil war, a peacekeeping plane was shot down minutes after unloading a shipment of food. The 14 people onboard died because the pilot ignored regulations. Eight days later, another U.N. cargo plane also crashed because, again, the pilot broke standard safety rules, killing another nine people.
"I was devastated," Mr. Arroyo recalled recently in an interview at Nairobi's Wilson Airport. "But it also showed me that you need to teach safety through harsh and unfriendly decisions."
Mr. Arroyo's bosses soon also realized that the U.N. couldn't continue ignoring the hazards facing its workers.
Months after the Angola crashes, a U.N.-chartered plane smashed into a mountain in Kosovo, in former Yugoslavia, killing 21 U.N. top brass and aid workers. Then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan immediately ordered an investigation into how the U.N. was conducting air operations around the world.
[Airlift]
The result was an order, issued in 2001, to tighten standards for airlines chartered by all U.N. agencies. The WFP, which has one of the U.N.'s largest air operations and strong economic leverage, got the job. Mr. Arroyo was appointed in 2002 to lead the new safety unit, which officially began its work in 2004.
Mr. Arroyo brought with him both aviation and humanitarian-aid experience. While flying supersonic Mirage fighter jets for the Peruvian air force in the 1980s, he had also trained as a crash investigator and subsequently flew as a test-pilot in Brazil. After joining the U.N. in 1994, Mr. Arroyo spent four years with peacekeeping operations in Western Sahara and Angola, before running air operations there for the WFP.
The immediate goal of the new WFP unit was to set rigorous quality standards for contractors. Mr. Arroyo's team first insisted that carriers the WFP regularly hired -- or might hire -- keep detailed maintenance records, limit the hours pilots could fly and train staff regularly.
The chartered planes also had to carry advanced navigation and collision-avoidance electronics to cut the risk of operating in dangerous places. Carriers that didn't comply with all the new requirements lost their contracts.
Mr. Arroyo's effort soon turned to helping carriers adopt the new safety measures through on-the-ground training and regular surveillance by regional WFP officers across Africa.
Conny Akerstrom is Mr. Arroyo's deputy in Nairobi. A 40-year-old Swede who had previously worked in Afghanistan, Mr. Akerstrom's task is to train and monitor airlines across east Africa.
[Conny Akerstrom]
On a recent morning, Mr. Akerstrom checked the safety procedures of Kenyan carrier ALS, which is based at Wilson Airport. The WFP and other aid organizations hire ALS for humanitarian flights, and the carrier also has a regular commercial business.
High on Mr. Akerstrom's agenda: maps and flight information.
In most countries, crews fly with charts from Jeppesen, a subsidiary of Boeing Co. that publishes the latest updates provided by aviation authorities. But national air authorities in much of sub-Saharan Africa lack the resources to map airspace and airfields in detail. So pilots for decades have flown around much of the continent using road maps, landmarks and memory.
The WFP has urged ALS and other carriers to create their own maps and charts -- informally known as "Jungle Jepps" -- using reports and measurements from pilots on the field.
In ALS's offices, decorated with photos of George Clooney and other celebrities the airline has taken on safaris, Mr. Akerstrom leafed through a binder to assess the airline's progress.
"Do not overfly Rwanda!!" reads one note on the airstrip chart for Goma, Congo. The chart for El-Berde, Somalia, reads: "Airport is difficult to distinguish from surrounding area; big birds over the town and around the field."
Many accidents happen across Africa simply because planes aren't properly repaired or readied for flight, says Mr. Akerstrom. So another issue he stressed that morning was maintenance. He surveyed ALS's hangar with Nilesh Somaia, who has been ALS's safety officer since the airline created the post three years ago at the WFP's behest.
The Swede opened a long red case and pulled out a sophisticated torque wrench used to tighten bolts on landing gear and other critical points on a plane. The wrench requires regular adjustment to remain precise.
"How do you know it's properly calibrated?" Mr. Akerstrom asked a manager in the hangar, who quickly flipped open a log book to show a certification document.
"How do you [it refers to] this tool?" Mr. Akerstrom continued, looking for information linking the paper to the wrench in his hands. The manager pointed to identical serial numbers and Mr. Akerstrom nodded. "You need to put labels on the tools," he instructed.
"We're getting there," sighed Mr. Somaia.
In much of the Western world, the requests made by Mr. Arroyo's team would have barely met air-safety regulations. But the WFP requirements were far more stringent than the rules set by most African civil-aviation authorities.
Much of the blame for Africa's aviation woes lies with a patchwork of national regulators who are meant to ensure safety. But many lack the resources or political will to enforce global rules and often fail to cooperate. Over the years, weak or corrupt aviation authorities in countries including Sierra Leone, Equatorial Guinea and Swaziland have imposed little oversight, allowing scores of barely regulated airlines to sprout with insufficient funding. The European Union last year banned carriers from those three and two other African countries, on the grounds their regulators didn't adhere to global safety rules.
"It is absolutely imperative that the WFP sets the standards because they cannot rely on the civil-aviation authorities to do it in most of Africa," says Steve Wybenga, technical director at South Africa's Executive Turbine Holdings, an airline that works for the WFP.
Another key element of the WFP's current effort is no-blame incident reporting. Aviation officials in the U.S. and Europe latched onto this idea years ago, when then realized that humans would always make mistakes. So they developed systems for people in the industry to reveal glitches anonymously and report slip-ups without fear of retribution.
That openness is one of the major reasons aviation has become much safer over recent decades. It has allowed regulators to collect mountains of safety data, from which they have extrapolated dangerous trends and identified hidden threats to aviation safety. U.S. aviation regulators, for example, receive hundreds of safety reports each week.
But in Africa, this type of information rarely flowed. When Mr. Arroyo's team started on their safety project in 2002, they collected only around 20 reports about unusual incidents, accidents and crashes from carriers and national authorities across the continent. They knew the number was far higher.
"The culture before was too punitive. If you found a problem with a superior, it was seen as insubordination," says Harry Ikumi, the quality-assurance manager at East African Safari Air Express and a former Kenyan Civil Aviation Authority official.
A spokesman for the Kenyan CAA says the agency is now lifting its own standards and those for operators, and supports all efforts to improve safety.
The reporting efforts by ALS and other airlines have yielded results. In the first nine months of 2006, Mr. Akerstrom collected reports on 101 significant incidents or accidents in Kenya and five neighboring countries -- a notable improvement over 2002.
WFP officials acknowledge that although data indicate improving safety, serious safety breaches still occur. Over just the past year, one plane in east Africa crashed because it was overloaded, according to recent report compiled by Mr. Akerstrom. On another flight, the crew decided to land on an airfield even though a disabled plane blocked the runway.
Another problem remains lack of funds, as WFP's safety requirements are expensive for most African airlines to implement. Sending Mr. Somaia to a safety course in Sweden, for example, was a financial burden for ALS. The airline also had to take out a loan to buy new safety equipment.
Still, investing in safety does yield financial results.
"Clients who have safety in mind will pay more," said ALS managing director Aslam Khan. Higher fares mean ALS can then invest more money in good equipment and safety, benefiting both passengers and the airlines.
That's the cycle Mr. Arroyo hopes to create across Africa. Beyond WFP aid flights, he says, "we want to be a catalyst" for a better culture of aviation safety.
Write to Daniel Michaels at daniel.michaels@wsj.com3
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