In and Out of Africa

Emaye Beyene says she has no idea who Bill Clinton is. But sitting in her small hut, wearing a loose-fitting green dress, the Ethiopian mother of five says she does know that a “special guest” came here to learn how solar power helps her life.

“We don’t need to buy kerosene,” she says about the benefits of the plastic, black-and-white solar panel that protrudes from her straw and mud home, “and our children can study at night.”

Ms. Beyene’s village was the first stop by former President Clinton on a six-day, whirlwind African tour that ended this month.

Mr. Clinton crisscrossed the continent — from Ethiopia to Rwanda, to Liberia, and finally to Senegal — to promote charitable projects like Rema’s and examine firsthand the progress of the William J. Clinton Foundation in fighting disease and poverty.

Accompanied by an entourage of about 100 friends, family, members of the news media, and a documentary film crew, the trip symbolized Mr. Clinton’s return to his role as “humanitarian in chief” after his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, lost her bid for the White House.

But some charge that the trip was as much about improving his public image as helping Africans, and it did move at a pace that was more like a political campaign than a donor visit.

Mr. Clinton logged more than 4,000 miles in the air over Africa, and sometimes spent scant time on the ground, virtually parachuting into Senegal for three hours before departing.

Solar Energy

Despite the packed schedule, which was in part due to transportation problems, Mr. Clinton said he was excited to be back in Africa, where he said he wanted to promote innovative ways to help the 325 million people who live on less than $1 a day.

In Rema, which is perched on a green ridge in Ethiopia’s northern highlands, about a five-hour drive on bumpy dirt roads from the capital of Addis Ababa, he came to publicize the work of the Solar Energy Foundation. In 2006, the German charity wired the homes of the village’s 5,500 people with 1,100 solar panels.

Dressed in a black shirt, grey jeans, and boots, Mr. Clinton arrived by helicopter, waving to about 300 people and receiving a “gabi,” a traditional white shawl, from village leaders.

With his daughter, Chelsea, at his side, he learned how solar energy allows Rema’s residents to have low-wattage lights in their huts and play radios and other small electrical devices. Before this, like most of the Ethiopia’s rural residents — only 1 percent of whom have access to electricity — they used diesel generators and kerosene lamps.

And while lighting up the village with clean energy, harnessing the sun for power also has social and health benefits, said Harald Schutzeichel, founder and director of the Solar Energy Foundation.

He said it allows medical clinics to keep vaccines for polio and other diseases refrigerated, fuels water pumps, allows for adult education classes to meet at night, and creates local jobs for electrical technicians, whom the energy group trains.

“For us it’s a normal light,” Mr. Schutzeichel told the former president. “For them, it’s hope.”

In a classroom, with four new lights dangling from the ceiling, Mr. Clinton peppered Mr. Schutzeichel with questions on wattage, storage capacity of batteries, and production restraints.

“He was testing me,” Mr. Schutzeichel said later, smiling because the former president seemed pleased with the progress of the program.

Indeed, Mr. Clinton said the project, which is the largest of its kind in East Africa and cost roughly $450,000, should be duplicated in other parts of the world that lack electricity.

“What we’re trying to do is sell this model. It fights climate change and puts local people to work,” he told journalists. “This is the power equivalent of the cellphone.”

Travel Headaches

While the visit to Rema went smoothly, the Clinton trip overall was beset by logistical problems caused by airplane malfunctions.

At the start of the trek, a 727 jet carrying roughly half of the guests, mostly reporters, experienced an electrical fire, a problematic oxygen valve, and other mechanical complications, grounding the flight from Newark, N.J., to Ethiopia.

The group arrived after a 55-hour delay. But the gremlin-like breakdowns did not stop there.

During the second leg of the trip to Rwanda, Mr. Clinton’s plane, which was borrowed from Google executives, aborted takeoff due to an engine failure. He joined the press plane for the two-hour journey, while the rest of his personal entourage took a chartered Ethiopian Airlines flight.

The travel snafus essentially doubled the cost of the trip to about $1-million and forced Clinton foundation staff members to scramble to lease new planes and rearrange the schedule.

The confusion did, however, have its comedic moments: As the former president was about to board the replacement plane to Rwanda, a flight attendant quickly culled a stack of magazines for potentially offensive material.

“We also have a People with Obama on the cover, and I’m, like, maybe not,” she said, pulling the publication and putting it next to a Star magazine.

Logistical obstacles aside, the trip did show the breadth of Mr. Clinton’s philanthropy. His organization works to do a range of things, such as training local health workers to make home visits and helping coffee farmers sell their product in the United States.

And it showed that Mr. Clinton is a foundation leader who likes to get his hands dirty.

In Rwanda, the former president met farmers who grow cassava, a plant that produces a white, tubular root used to make porridge. The foundation distributed cuttings of the plant in the country’s eastern region, where previously a virus had almost wiped out the crop.

The cuttings, which are resistant to the virus, known as mosaic, are expected to produce 16,000 acres of cassava this year, said Graham Morgan, who oversees projects in Rwanda for the Clinton foundation. He said the crop would increase food security for families and help them earn a little extra cash.

Ever the Arkansas farm boy, Mr. Clinton talked crop yields and soil as he walked past rows of cassava, a chest-high bush with green leaves.

“This is a good field; they get huge yields here. But it’s easier in the larger context of the country, certainly, to plant the cassava up in the hills where the topsoil is thinner,” he said. He added that the Rwandan farmers usually prefer to save the thick soil to grow maize or soybeans.

Fighting Disease

For the final two stops in Africa, Mr. Clinton focused on deadly diseases.

In Senegal, he announced with the World Health Organization a new approach to treating HIV/AIDS in newborns. In Liberia, a country ravaged by civil strife, he offered a hand in helping to alleviate the damage wrought by malaria, which is responsible for almost 60 percent of Liberian deaths.

During the hour drive from the airport to the western African nation’s capital of Monrovia, the nation’s needs were apparent.

This virtual tropical paradise with palm trees and beautiful views of the Atlantic still showed signs of the civil war that ended five years ago.

Blue-helmeted United Nations soldiers patroled the streets, the half-built Ministry of Health building was smeared with black, and a worn billboard asked Liberians to “Stop mob violence.”

Speaking at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which serves as the headquarters of Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Mr. Clinton said that America has an obligation to assist Liberia, which was founded by freed slaves.

For his part, he said he had forged a deal to make more antimalaria drugs available to Africans.

In an agreement with several large drug manufacturers, Mr. Clinton said they would reduce by 35 percent the price of artemisinin, a malaria treatment derived from a plant.

“That means for the same amount of money you will serve far more people,” he said to Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, members of the country’s parliament, and other dignitaries.

Mr. Clinton, whose foundation is also promoting investment in the nascent Liberian tourism industry, said that health gains would also support the nation’s economy.

“A big part of Liberia’s comeback economically will involve wiping away all these plagues. Every year hundreds of thousands of Liberians miss weeks of work and school and many people die, especially children, because of malaria,” he said.

The malaria deal is similar to one Mr. Clinton negotiated several years ago for antiretrovirals, drugs that slow HIV, and helped Africa and other impoverished areas gain access to the life-prolonging medicines.

The Clinton foundation also announced this month it would do more to help prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS among black Americans, saying that as a population, they have a greater infection rate than some sub-Saharan nations like Senegal.

Celebrity Guests

During the Africa trip, the ex-president invited other charity-minded people to join him.

The unusual guest list included Mr. Clinton’s half-brother, Roger; Cheers star Ted Danson and his wife, Mary Steenburgen; Terry McAuliffe, former chairman of Sen. Clinton’s presidential campaign; and Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador who had a public fight with the Bush administration about his wife, the former intelligence officer Valerie Plame.

One of the guests, J.B. Pritzker, the billionaire hotel magnate, said the tour taught him how much more value a donated dollar has in impoverished nations than it does in the United States.

After visiting an Ethiopian health clinic in Debre Zeyit, a rural area outside Addis Ababa, he said $1-million could build three of the Ethiopian medical facilities and pay their operating cost for almost a year.

But he also said that given the lack of good roads, poor nutrition among the population, and other factors, a philanthropist working to improve health or education in Africa must juggle a lot more variables than one donating in America.

“You can have more bang for your buck here,” he said. “But it’s so much more complex.”

Mr. Pritzker said actually meeting Africans and seeing where they lived and worked was invaluable to his philanthropy education.

But some in the nonprofit world, such as William A. Schambra, director of the Hudson Institute’s Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal, a conservative think tank in Washington, questioned the value of the trip and its price tag.

“As President Clinton himself pointed out, a million dollars can fund a great deal in Africa,” he wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle. “Or, it can finance a whirlwind junket for the former president, friends, members of his family, and a film crew to record the event. The president chose the latter, and I think that was ill-advised.”

Others saw the trip as a way to refocus news-media attention on Mr. Clinton’s philanthropy after the negative press he received for his role in the presidential campaign of his wife, a Democrat from New York.

But Bruce Lindsay, chief executive of the Clinton foundation, said the former president comes to Africa every year and that the trip was to raise publicity for good causes, not for Mr. Clinton.

For Africans, at least, the debate may be a moot point.

Bonny Muskombozi, a Rwandan journalist for The New Times, an English-language newspaper in Kigali, said he thinks most of his countrymen believe Mr. Clinton to be earnest in his desire to help their homeland.

Indeed, Mr. Clinton has said he owes the nation a great debt for not having done more as president to prevent the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

When asked if Mr. Clinton does the charity work to improve his image, Mr. Muskombozi said, “I don’t think so. He has been the president of the U.S.A.; he has made his name.”

“The fact he is involved in health issues — fighting AIDS, building hospitals — it is viewed with a lot of potency here,” he said.

Indeed, across the continent Mr. Clinton was greeted like a rock star, with enthusiastic crowds, dance performances, and occasional chants of his name.

But not all Africans are content with Mr. Clinton’s humanitarian efforts.

After Mr. Clinton finished his speech in Monrovia, a Liberian legislator stood up and questioned the former president’s approach on malaria, which emphasizes treatment.

“Mr. President, we are not in agreement,” said Joyce M. Freeman Sumo, a senator who represents Montserrado, a city on Monrovia’s coast. “We come from a different place of thought. We should try and stop the things that bring malaria,” such as trash heaps and abandoned cars, which are breeding grounds for the mosquitoes that spread the deadly disease.

Mr. Clinton responded that he recognizes the need for such steps, but that the Clinton foundation’s expertise is in medicine and the American government provides money that could be used to prevent disease, such as buying bed nets.

Afterward, Ms. Sumo, dressed in a long African dress of purple and black, said she was satisfied with his answer.

But she hoped he would still think differently about fighting malaria.

“While you are working on malaria control,” she told The Chronicle, “you can still prevent the disease from happening.”