NONE OF the East African countries are likely to be celebrating when the winners are announced this month in a competition for $1 billion worth of new US development aid.

Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda may all fail to qualify on the grounds of official corruption. Tanzania also appears to fall short on measurements pertaining to governments’ investments in their people, while Uganda seems to be lagging in a set of criteria entitled "ruling justly."

Of the three East African states, Kenya may have the best chance of scoring an upset victory, according to Steve Radelet, a former US government official who is monitoring the selection process for the new Millennium Challenge Account programme.

According to Mr Radelet’s tabulations, Kenya is one of seven countries likely to be disqualified solely on the basis of corruption.

"I wouldn’t be totally shocked if Kenya were added to the list of winners," says Mr Radelet, who currently works at the Centre for Global Development, a Washington-based NGO.

The standards for judging success are based on data from 2002, Mr Radelet points out. "Normally, two-year-old statistics would be a reliable-enough measurement," he says. "But that may not be true in the case of Kenya, especially regarding corruption, because of the change in government during that time."

Uganda’s apparent disqualification may be due "more to perceptions than to reality" in regard to the country’s governance, Mr Radelet adds. Ugandan officials have been making this argument as part of a lobbying effort in Washington, Mr Radelet notes.

He says Kenya has not been making as visible an attempt to persuade US officials to include Kenya in the new aid programme.

Mr Radelet recently listed 17 developing countries as those likeliest to qualify when the US government agency administering the Millennium Challenge Account announces results at a meeting scheduled for the second week of May.

Eight of Mr Radelet’s designated frontrunners are in Africa. They include Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal. In addition, Mr Radelet names Burkina Faso as one of three "near-miss" countries that could receive a smaller portion of the new aid.

The Millennium Challenge Account is designed as a "performance-based" programme that rewards countries for combating corruption, respecting democratic rights, fostering a free-market economy, and spending money on public health and education. Countries accepted into the programme will be expected to formulate specific project proposals on the basis of consultations with civil society. The US will then parcel out the $1 billion in initial Millennium Challenge funds to projects deemed worthy.

President George W Bush announced the Millennium initiative two years ago, pledging that it would entail a doubling of the funds that the US commits to foreign aid. Some $5 billion a year will eventually be distributed through the programme, the president indicated. Launched six months after the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the Millennium Challenge Account amounts to a recognition that efforts to combat global poverty can serve US security interests.

A total of 75 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America meet the poverty standards for potential eligibility. But due to a variety of factors, the US Congress does not permit any American development aid to go to 12 of those countries.

Acceptance into the programme is based on how well each of the remaining 63 countries scores in relation to the others on a variety of tests. In order to qualify, a country must exceed the group’s median on half the indicators in each of three categories: "ruling justly," "investing in people," and "establishing economic freedom." No country can qualify unless it also surpasses the median on the index of official corruption.

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