Washington — Hillary Clinton, making her first journey to Africa as U.S. Secretary of State, begins a seven-nation visit Monday with a stop in Kenya to take part in a forum on trade and investment with senior officials from 41 African nations.
She will also visit South Africa, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Liberia and Cape Verde, returning to Washington on August 14. "All of these countries are of importance and significance to the United States," Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson said in an interview last week. Coming three weeks after President Obama’s visit to Ghana, the trip underscores the administration’s commitment to making Africa an American foreign policy priority, he said.
Clinton will deliver a policy address on Wednesday in Nairobi during the opening session of the African Growth and Opportunity Forum, the 8th annual meeting mandated by the African Growth and Opportunity Act, the U.S. law which promotes U.S-African trade. She will hold meetings with African ministers of commerce, trade and finance to talk about Africa’s potential "to play a much larger role in global trade," Carson said.
She plans meetings with Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to encourage both to move forward "as swiftly as possible on the Kofi Annan agreements that ended the post-election… violence of 2007." She will also be talking in Kenya and during several other stops about agriculture and food security, which the Obama administration has made one of its policy priorities.
In Nairobi, she is scheduled to meet Sheikh Sharif Ahmed, president of Somalia‘s Transitional Federal Government (TFG). With conflict and instability in Somalia causing increasing problems not only for countries in the region but internationally in the form of piracy, Carson said the United States continues to back the regional peace process known as the Djibouti process, which gave rise to the TFG.
