Dataset of the Day: The State Department's Forgotten Continent

Decisions are made by those who show up. Since the State Department is responsible for promoting peace and stability in regions of vital interest, the Secretary of State has to show up in a region to promote diplomacy there.  The travels of a Secretary of State thus reflects the foreign policy priorities of a Government.

Data from all the countries that current Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice has traveled to in the past 4 years and the number of times that she traveled there are available in Finder! for the years 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008. The following figure illustrates the premise of this blog:

Yes. this is the world. Oops, no not exactly – it has a continent missing in it – Africa! After several years of using cartographic projections that misrepresented Africa as being smaller than Greenland, now we seem to have completely eliminated it from our scope of interest. Yet, this is a continent that could use help the most. A continent that suffers from diseases and despair; inhuman tragedies – caused both by nature and humans. But beyond the formal visits, how much do we actually spend on this continent?

USAID has a interesting collection of data on the amount of economic assistance that is being dispersed to individual countries. You can find the data here in Finder! The following figure illustrates the disparity. The darker the color of the country on the map, the more assistance they received from the U.S. in 2006. Apparently we gave approximately $5 to each person in Africa while we gave $400 to certain countries in the Middle East that are already quite well developed. As you can see below, the greenback sure is thin in Africa!