Tailored Aid for a Tailored Age?

In this short essay, senior fellow David Wheeler compares the world’s foreign assistance architecture to how the rest of the world operates in the digital age. He suggests that multilateral and bilateral transactions from one behemoth to another (B2B) may be stuck in the past now that technology can and should create more person-to-person (P2P) foreign aid programs.

The foreign assistance world, he argues, should learn from the worlds of business, entertainment, and interpersonal communications, which are fragmenting into interconnected nodes that continually form and reform through the web as needed. He explains why predigital-age B2B assistance should give way to P2P aid and suggests what that may look like.

Preview