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Aid Reform Alphabet Soup

John Fawcett
October 09, 2009

Eighteen months ago this week, the House Foreign Affairs Committee held the first of several hearings on reforming U.S. foreign assistance. In his opening remarks, the chairman stated: “It is painfully obvious to Congress, the administration, foreign aid experts, and NGOs alike that our foreign assistance program is fragmented and broken and in critical need of overhaul.”

Since then, Congress, the State Department and the White House have each developed separate initiatives related to reforming foreign aid:

FAA. Under the leadership of Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA), the House Foreign Affairs Committee continues to craft a new Foreign Assistance Act (FAA), the body of law that governs U.S. foreign aid which has not been comprehensively re-authorized since 1985. The Committee has circulated an initial FAA concept paper, and is expected to introduce draft legislation early next year. In the meantime, Chairman Berman has introduced the Initiating Foreign Assistance Reform Act of 2009 (H.R.2139) as a “down payment” on a more comprehensive re-authorization.

QDDR. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has launched her own aid reform effort, the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR). Modeled after the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review, this ambitious review will seek to create the “short-, medium-, and long-term blueprint for our diplomatic and development efforts.” The QDDR has been organized into five working groups with promising if somewhat opaque headings like “Building a global architecture of cooperation” and “Investing in the building blocks of stronger societies.”

PSD. Not to be outdone, President Barack Obama has signed a Presidential Study Directive (PSD) ordering a government-wide review of U.S. global development policy to be conducted by the National Security Council. Significantly, the PSD will extend beyond just foreign assistance and examine other development tools such as trade, debt cancellation, economic policy (via the IMF, for example) and agricultural policy.

Encouragingly, each of these efforts has solicited input from NGOs and civil society. How and whether these separate initiatives come together to form a coherent and meaningfully reformed development strategy is unclear. The Foreign Affairs Committee will apparently wait to release a draft of the FAA rewrite until it can be informed by the initial results of the QDDR and PSD in January. This may be an encouraging sign that these various efforts will complement rather than compete.

In this aid reform alphabet soup recipe, Congress, the White House and the State Department should all remember one key ingredient: the MDGs. Nearly a decade after their creation, the Millennium Development Goals are still the most comprehensive framework the world has for ending extreme poverty. With specific, time-bound goals to improve the health and well-being of the world’s poorest, the achievement of the MDGs should be the objective of any comprehensive development strategy.

For more, check out RESULTS foreign aid reform campaign page.

Read More: Foreign Aid Reform

Online Discussion  Please note the comments expressed on this page are not necessarily those of RESULTS or RESULTS Educational Fund.
By wedding June 22 at 2:57 am	Nearly all of the wedding invitation in the colors of the wedding invitation . The colored linings of the envelopes for the cheap wedding invitations themselves,for the Parasol cheap wedding invitations or a single gingko fan with the Ginkgo Retro Verso wedding invitation wording . The fashion games arecoordinate with the double-colored borders.
By Martin Byakuleka October 14 at 11:21 am	I like the heading of “Investing in the building blocks of stronger societies”: It is absolutely relevant. And as you say, John, without a focus upon the MDGs no much progress will be achieved. It ought to be emphasized that poverty in LDCs is not only a problem but an impidement to overall progress in achieving foreign pursuits of the US. For example, there can never be any meaningful democratization in these countries without prior poverty alleviation. Ultimately, to pursue world peace by building democratic societies - because it is a given that democracies do not go to war with each other - it is imperative to circumvent poverty first. The forces of democratization are launched from an internal substructure of the LDCs; a domestic constituency nurtured by healthy incomes, healthy bodies and an informed (educated) citizenry. So, the best way to launch ambitious programs like democratization lies in impacting the internal substructure by alleviating poverty, treating diseases and educating citizens.

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