EDITOR’S NOTE: Considered an emerging donor, Brazil has focused its aid program on Africa, with nearly 40 percent of its technical cooperation grants in 2009 benefiting 19 African countries, according to Paulo Sotero, director of the Brazil Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. It follows a philosophy that differs considerably from other donors, even with fellow emerging economies such as China, because its development cooperation is not motivated by economic interests. A few excerpts:
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva could not hide his disappointment when he visited Maputo, last October (2008). He had expected to see signs of progress in the construction of a $23 million plant to produce generic drugs for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, which his administration had donated to Mozambique. As the most ambitious foreign assistance project ever launched by Brazil, the plant’s project was announced with some fanfare during the Brazilian president’s first visit to Maputo, in 2003. It was to have been built in four phases, with an operational start date in 2010, Lula’s last year in office. Brazil allocated $4 million for the project’s first phase.
The project was launched on the basis of Brazil’s international stature as a model country in the combat of HIV/AIDS, earned as a result of the work of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, known as Fiocruz, which is attached to the country’s Ministry of Health. Bringing the project to Africa, the continent most afflicted by the AIDS pandemic, was a bold political decision on the part of the current Brazilian administration, calculated to give meaning and substance to Lula’s government strategy to expand Brazil’s presence in the southern hemisphere.