The Guardian unpacks what USAID Administrator Raj Shah's recent speech at CGD means for USAID.
From the Article:
The head of the US Agency for International Development (USAid), Rajiv Shah, said yesterday that the agency will cut costs and become "more business-like" in how it operates in an effort to shore up public and congressional support for US foreign assistance ahead of anticipated budget cuts.
,p>Delivering a major address on "the modern development enterprise" at an event sponsored by the Washington DC-based thinktank, the Center for Global Development, Shah said the agency was on the verge of the most aggressive operational reform of a major federal bureaucracy.Dubbed USAid Forward, the reform effort is an early outcome of Hillary Clinton's quadrennial diplomacy and development review (QDDR) and aims to recast USAid as the world's leading development agency.
But, following the Republican takeover of the US House of Representatives in November 2010, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the new head of the US house foreign affairs committee, has made it clear that she intends to trim the fat off the foreign aid budget.
Contending with the anticipated cuts, Shah argued that development must be seen as a comparatively cheap and effective long-term strategy to achieve US economic and national security objectives. He also announced a series of measures to cut costs within the agency. In the UK, international development secretary Andrew Mitchell has also been vocal on the need to "inject some business-savvy DNA" into Department for International Development, as reported on this site yesterday.