Britain's National Audit Office (NAO), akin to the US Government Accountability Office or GAO, is applauding the Department for International Development's Multilateral Aid Review.
This blog was originally featured at AllAfrica.com.
In her recent Foreign Policy column, "The Pivot to Africa," Rosa Brooks made a plea for letting go of comfortable old assumptions about roles and missions between the civilian and non-civilian sides of the US government, particularly when it comes to US civil-military cooperation in Africa. My plea is for an evidence-based discussion of US development policy and its intersection with US national security.
US interests will be ill-served if we merely move from comfortable old (and false) assumptions about poverty and terrorism in Africa to comfortable new (and equally false) assumptions about "whole-of-government responses" to complex challenges. While the United States should of course think and work creatively, skepticism and, dare I say, opposition, from civilian agencies to AFRICOM taking on non-traditional military roles is not rooted in turf battles but in legitimate concerns about efficiency and results.
This is a joint post with Ruth Summers.
Want to know what Americans think about the foreign aid budget? They think it is big. If they thought it were small, they might want to cut it less. On the other hand, they might not. In fact the real problem isn’t the actual or perceived size of the aid budget, it is what people think is done with it. They believe a lot of aid money is wasted. Want to shore up support for development assistance? Rather than say ‘but it is such a small amount!’ try persuading people it might do some good.
USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) saw this coming a long way off. Sifting through their archive of food security updates, there are myriad warnings of drought and an impending food security crisis. As early as August 2010, FEWS NET predicted “below-normal rains… due to a developing La Niña event” and an
Especially in times of budget pressure, the debate over rationales for foreign assistance revive. Last night on PBS’ Newshour, former First Lady Laura Bush, Melinda Gates, and Helene Gayle, president of CARE, spoke eloquently about the importance of Congress maintaining funding for maternal and child health. I was heartened and impressed by their commitment, but also a little discomfited by the emphasis on national security as a key motivation for aid.