Ideas to Action:
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A sense of doom and gloom is hanging over the aid community. Those of us who pretend to be optimists are succumbing to the growing recognition that hopes are dimming for reorienting and restructuring U.S. aid programs for better effectiveness and support of U.S. foreign policy goals.
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Representative Howard Berman released draft legislation, the Global Partnerships Act, that would rewrite the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. As noted here earlier, the FAA has not been re-authorized by Congress since 1985. Berman, previously as cha
With the planned release this Thursday of a draft Foreign Assistance Act (FAA) from Ranking Minority Member Howard Berman, I began to reflect on how to explain the need for revisions to the current law. After all, some folks in the Administration would rather stick with what we have than expend time and effort in writing a more up-to-date act. So with the help of a former president, here’s my first attempt at an explanation.
At the start of summer, I asked our loyal readers to come up with a new name for GAFSP – the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program at the World Bank. Something that rolled off the lips a little easier and didn’t sound like the speaker was sneezing, but still captured the essence of its mission to promote food security and agriculture productivity.
We are delighted to announce a new member of the Rethink team! Sarah Jane and Steve Staats welcomed Sebastian George Staats on July 11. We give you the (Re)Thinker.
Every four or five years, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) reviews the aid programs of its 23 member nations (plus the European Commission). The last peer review was in 2006; the 2011 review was released yesterday.
I recently challenged readers to take matters into our own hands and rename the unpronounceable and unimaginative GAFSP. GAFSP is the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program at the World Bank to which several countries and the Gates Foundation have pledged contributions.
This post originally appeared on the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network's ModernizeAid blog as a part of its Modern Legislation: Moving from Policy to Practice series.
In the fiscal year 2010 foreign operations appropriations bill, Congress earmarked nearly 70 percent of funding for bilateral economic assistance (Title III). The health and democratic governance received 36 percent of total aid funding; agriculture, education, infrastructure, and the environment all received less than 6 percent each.
The problems are threefold.
The practice of earmarking causes inefficiencies in the management of funds.
Success is measured by how much money is spent rather than on outcomes.
And, it runs counter to the goal of country ownership.
It takes months for USAID and the State Department to sort out the various sector, program, and country directives (in consultations with the Appropriations Committees) and transform the bill into a workable plan for obligating funds. That means that only a few months remain in each fiscal year to spend those funds in a responsible and efficient manner. The fact that foreign assistance programs operate in often complex environments makes this a very difficult task and one fraught with the temptation to let speed of disbursement trump other measures of effectiveness.
Some of you may have caught the New York Times opinion piece by Glenn Zorpette, who has been covering electrical power issues for two decades, urging that a USAID power project in Afghanistan be turned over to the Army Corps of Engineers. Zorpette is right that the project is troubled, but he is wrong about the solution.
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