This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 4th, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

The President will be meeting with 50 African leaders this week in Washington, but the few minutes the President will be spending with each of these leaders will accomplish far less than simply reducing trade restrictions with those same nations.

And most of the reforms that will help African countries develop are domestic in nature.

So says Dahlibor Roach, a policy analyst

at the Cato Institute.

I'm afraid it's mostly an exercise in symbolic politics.

The idea that anything meaningful of

anything of substance could be resolved at the six, eight hour summit at which

President Obama is gathering 50 African leaders is highly implausible.

African countries do share some of the common challenges, some of them, most of them count among the most underdeveloped in the world.

But in the end every African country is different.

Every African country has slightly different needs, slightly different problems and the idea that President Obama

will take 50 different African leaders in the room and discuss everything ranging from security, trade, to sustainable development,

to peacekeeping, to governance, to corruption, to illicit finance flow. To me, is just sounds fanciful.

Now this is the president obviously number one Africa is a very diverse

continent it's huge it's know, Americans don't really appreciate the

massive size of Africa as a continent and six hours devoted to talking to 50 world

leaders about all of the very different problems that these countries are facing.

Is there anything that, I don't know, the president could learn today that would possibly

change U.S. policy in those areas to fix things?

I think the interesting thing about Africa is that it's been actually making growth of progress

in recent years.

...