Washington ? Back from an eight-day visit to three African nations, Sen. Sam Brownback called the humanitarian crisis in Congo “dire” and said foreign aid programs there need better coordination.

The Kansas Republican said more than 1,000 people a day in eastern Congo are dying from preventable causes, such as malaria, diarrhea and a lack of food and water.

“The whole assistance policy really needs to be rethought and there needs to be more prioritizing and self-help involved,” Brownback said. “There needs to be a lot more coordination.”

Brownback and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., were on the official congressional trip to gauge conditions in Congo, Rwanda and Kenya, where they met with local officials, diplomats and aid workers.

Congo is slowly recovering from back-to-back wars that killed an estimated 4 million people between 1996 and 2002. Thousands of Hutu rebels fled to eastern Congo after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide that killed more than 500,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Rwanda and Uganda have invaded Congo twice, in 1996 and 1998, under the auspices of ousting Hutu rebels.

There is still sporadic fighting in eastern Congo, and Brownback said two of the most unfortunate side-effects are the use of child soldiers and the use of sexual violence as a tool of war.

“Many of the women – girls, mothers, young and old – are raped multiple times,” he said.

At one hospital that gives medical treatment to rape victims, Brownback said he interviewed a 4-year-old girl and a 60-year-old woman who had been victims of multiple rapes.

While there have been some recent improvements in restoring the economy, Brownback said he is frustrated that millions of dollars of aid are going to Congo, but apparently having little impact on solving the problems of disease and hunger.

“There’s lots of entities, but very little coordination,” he said. “We may need to get an overarching African aid czar to coordinate these programs.”

Brownback said he is in the early stages of drafting legislation that would link some African aid to self-help efforts, such as asking people to build roads in exchange for food or providing free school lunches if the community operates a school.

The last day of his trip was spent in Kenya, meeting with wildlife conservation officials.