Delaware and Kenya must stay — together — on the front line of innovation | Tom Carper

For much of our nation's history, Congress has spent most of the month of August in recess before reconvening just after Labor Day. During this year's August recess, I crisscrossed Delaware as I have done for years, from north to south to east to west, often times joining forces with Sen. Chris Coons, Rep. Lisa Blunt Rochester and other state and local officials.

What we learned in Delaware

We visited a wide range of construction projects underway throughout Delaware, many funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that I helped author as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in 2021. For Delaware’s rural and historically underserved communities, the law is addressing public transit, legacy pollution, broadband access, improvements to the Route 9 Corridor, and more. For example, the law provides roughly $186 million over five years to improve public transit, which is critical for equity in our state, where non-white households are almost four times more likely to commute via public transportation. Additionally, the law provides $100 million for Delaware to expand affordable, high-speed internet access. Every dollar invested is a dollar to improve the lives of everyone up and down the First State.

And thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, we have put our nation on a path to a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the end of this decade. In just a year, companies have announced the creation of more than 170,000 new clean energy jobs – and this law is generating a clean energy boom, lowering everyday costs for families, and creating good-paying jobs across America. The Inflation Reduction Act is also helping lower health care costs. From Delaware to the West Coast and everywhere in between, Americans are feeling the impact of these cost savings — from seniors saving on prescription medications to families saving on health insurance premiums. What’s more, the Inflation Reduction Act is helping make our tax system fairer and more equitable while also ensuring that the wealthiest Americans and highly profitable corporations pay their fair share.

It’s been great to visit so many business owners, farmers, families and students this past August. We call many of these local visits "customer calls" in which my team and I would usually ask those we visit three questions: One, "How are you doing?” Two, “How are we — Delaware's congressional delegation, as well as our state and local government officials — doing?” And three, “What can we do to help?"

What we learned in Kenya

And in mid-August, Coons and I joined a bipartisan, bicameral group of nearly 20 House members for a five-day seminar in Kenya sponsored by the nonpartisan Aspen Institute that would focus on America's involvement in Africa and the growth opportunities awaiting us there. For decades, the Aspen Institute has hosted bipartisan gatherings of Congressional members in the U.S. and abroad in order to focus on a wide range of challenges and opportunities that might lend themselves to bipartisan solutions.

Many Americans — including my wife and I — first became truly aware of Kenya and its people years ago when we were blown away by the breathtakingly beautiful setting that Kenya provides for the Academy Award winning film “Out of Africa,” starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford.

More recently — along with viewers from around the world — we watched with admiration as many of Kenya’s long-distance runners dominated Olympic competition in a number of events. But as we learned on our relatively brief visit to Kenya last month, there's a lot about the nation that merits our attention and involvement. And if we're smart about it, it will benefit both of our countries.

On a human level, we found the people of Kenya to be warm, friendly and welcoming. Many Kenyans were proud to share with us their family connections to the U.S., or if they had visited the U.S. during their lives on vacation or to attend college.

Kenyans are also understandably proud of the breathtaking beauty of the vast expanses of their country. They have established a number of conservatories across parts of their nation to ensure that the wildlife we were privileged to see with our own eyes (lions, cheetahs, leopards, rhinoceros, to mention just a few) will continue to flourish and attract visitors from throughout the world for centuries to come.

Throughout my years of service in the in the U.S. Navy, as well as my service to the people of Delaware as state treasurer, congressman, governor and U.S. aenator, I've been guided — thanks to my mother — by the Golden Rule, "To treat others as we want to be treated." I've also been guided by the words of an ancient proverb, "Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day; teach a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime." Africa is the home of the fastest growing population on our planet, and it’s expected to account for one quarter of the world's population by 2050. We have an opportunity — and I believe a moral obligation — to help Kenyans think about continuing to innovate and move the country forward into the future.

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How Delaware and Kenya can learn from each other

Like Delaware, Kenya punches above its weight on a number of fronts. Also, like Delaware, two of Kenya’s major industries are agriculture and tourism. As the climate crisis continues to savage our planet, more of the world is focusing on green energy. Much of Delaware’s focus now includes clean hydrogen, which can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from, among other sources, large trucks and buses, as well as manufacturing. Kenya has an especially compelling story to tell on carbon emissions reduction. More than 80 percent of its energy needs are now being met by renewable sources, an expansion of reliance on solar power, as well as geothermal energy, which will only burnish its green image further, as well as its hosting of the Climate Action Summit in early September of this year.

One of the highlights on our agenda was a meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Kenya, Meg Whitman, whose resume includes leadership stints at PayPal, Hewlett Packard and Proctor and Gamble. She made it clear to us that Kenya — like many of its neighbors — still faces a number of daunting challenges. While its most recent presidential election appears to have been won fairly by President William Ruto, corruption does remain a challenge in Kenya. Yet, third-party measures of corruption indicate positive trends in honest progress in recent years, and it’s important for that progress to continue. Ambassador Whitman has also called on Kenya to develop a consistent, transparent and fairly administered tax policy to further attract investment and accelerate economic growth.

Among the businesses that we visited in Kenya was Kentegra Biotechnology, a U.S.-Kenya company that is on the forefront of restoring Kenya as a leading producer of organic insecticides. Kentegra aggregates, extracts and refines pale refine extract from the pyrethrum flower, and sells the PRE to formulators around the world. To my surprise, the company is incorporated in — of all places —the state of Delaware, and its CEO shared with us that he has parents in Milton, Delaware! What a small world.

In terms of foreign trade, China is Kenya’s biggest trading partner. However, Kenya exports more to the U.S. than to China, and our mutual trade is growing.

As a longtime leader of a state whose preeminence in financial services and digital trade are well known, I didn't expect to find that Kenya has become a financial hub through an entity known as Amazon M-PESA, which enabled them to solve one of the biggest challenges in the mobile money market sector: mobile, secure, ubiquitous, low-cost payments. Over 50 million customers in seven countries process over 70% of Kenya’s transactions and 50% of Kenya's annual GDP flows through it.

At the conclusion of our trip, my congressional colleagues and I came away with a modest to-do list for when Congress reconvenes after Labor Day, including the reauthorization of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA); the implementation of climate provisions in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act to reduce drought in Kenya and other countries throughout the world; and continuing DREAMS — the Determined, Resilient, Empowered, AIDS-free, Mentored and Safe public-private partnership that addresses key factors that make girls and young women particularly vulnerable to HIV.

In reflecting on my August travel, I learned a lot about what’s on the minds of Delawareans and Kenyans, and it was eye-opening to see so many similarities in the work ahead for both of our countries. I am eager to get to work in our nation’s Capital to advance many of our shared priorities in the state and in the Senate.

Sen. Tom Carper has represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate since 2001.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Tom Carper: Kenya and Delaware are valued partners