By Marc Lacey
New York TimesJuly 9, 2003
The Neema Children's Center has disappeared into thin air, authorities here say, and so have other groups that claim to be fighting AIDS in this African capital. Neema, which means blessing in Swahili, last year presented the government a slick grant request outlining its work in helping AIDS orphans. There are an estimated 11 million children across Africa — including a million in Kenya — who have lost their parents to the disease. Many of them have been abandoned.
Neema won about $14,000 from Kenya's National Aids Control Council, the body that coordinates the government's anti-AIDS campaign. The money came from a World Bank grant intended to finance grass-roots work on AIDS. But auditors for the council recently cut off funds to Neema after failing to find a single orphan who had benefited from its work.
"We could not identify any orphan who received anything," said Kassim Mambo, a spokesman for the control council. "We couldn't find anyone who worked for Neema either."
As the death toll from AIDS mounts, more and more money is arriving from overseas to combat the disease. President Bush is touting his administration's three-year pledge of $15 billion in AIDS spending in a tour of Africa this week, and AIDS activists say that still more is needed to combat the epidemic. The money that is arriving, however, is more than sufficient to attract the attention of unscrupulous operators. Across Africa, fake AIDS charities, which often lack offices or phones, have sprung up. Experts say the impostors illustrate that while money is desperately needed to fight AIDS, so are programs to combat corruption and stimulate African economies. Fraudulent entrepreneurs must be offered more productive ways of making a living in AIDS-affected countries, they say, than deceiving the sick.
"Ever since AIDS arrived on the scene, we've had all manner of people, some with no professional expertise, trying to elbow in on the pandemic," said Frances Angila, the head of Kenya's oversight group for nongovernmental organizations. "The potential for fly-by-night organizations is very high. Sometimes it is a man and wife. Sometimes it's a few cronies who had a beer in a pub and decided that having an AIDS organization would be a good thing."
Kenya's AIDS oversight body recently stopped financing four such groups, including Neema, although none of the organizers have been apprehended. Another 10 are under investigation. In addition, the government recently suspended several hundred more nongovernmental organizations that did not properly document their spending. Several dozen of the suspended groups focused on AIDS. Experts say the bad apples represent only a small percentage of the 680 AIDS-related nongovernmental organizations in Kenya and of the hundreds of other community-based organizations working to combat the disease.
"I feel hurt when I see money going to people who don't have any actual work at all," said David Sira, who founded Kenya Aids and Drugs Alliance in 2001. His group employs five people and works across the country. Mr. Sira said he has AIDS and understands how hard everyday life can be for those who suffer from it. "I decided to educate people to reduce the stigma," he said. "I personally was close to committing suicide because of how I was treated."
Not only are mom-and-pop operations accused of misspending. Kenya's National AIDS Control Council, which finances the country's AIDS fight, has itself been accused of mishandling funds marked for the disease. The anticorruption unit of the Kenya police is currently investigating the group to determine whether it misspent $250,000 during the observance of World AIDS Day in 2001.
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is doling out huge amounts across the developing world, still granted Kenya's government $37 million recently for its AIDS fight. Some of the money will go to the control council. But Jerry van Mourick, the regional representative of the global fund, said he has pressed Kenyan officials to track the money closely. "We don't just write blank checks," Mr. van Mourick said in a telephone interview from Tanzania, where he was negotiating a $5.3 million AIDS grant. "A very important principle of the global fund is we need some assurance that the grant monies are properly spent."
The change in political leadership in Kenya is giving him and other donors some hope of increased oversight. Mwai Kibaki became president in December, replacing Daniel arap Moi, who was president for 24 years and is said to have left office while the country was riddled with corruption. Mr. Kibaki has begun an anti-corruption crackdown which has, among other things, led to the investigation of AIDS spending. Mr. Mambo, the spokesman for Kenya's AIDS control council, disputes allegations that most of the money the council receives goes to staff salaries. In the last year, about 800 organizations have received funds, he said, on the basis of endorsements by community leaders. Only a handful, he said, were fraudulent. "If some of the organizations are nonexistent or are not doing the work they were funded to do, NACC would be glad to receive those reports, and immediate action would be taken," Mr. Mambo said in a statement he prepared in defense of the National AIDS Control Council.
Kenya's health minister, Charity K. Ngulu, who has led the fight against AIDS fraud, accused the control council of squandering millions of dollars through shoddy accounting and questionable contracting procedures.There appears to be a political dimension to her attacks because she is said to be seeking to have control of the council, now part of the president's office, transferred to the health ministry. But Ms. Ngulu insists that her campaign is about disease prevention, not increasing her fiefdom. No more contracts ought to be awarded, she said, to what she calls briefcase nongovernmental organizations, which operate out of some shady character's attaché case.
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