In the aftermath of President Obama’s announcement of his new Afghanistan strategy and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s nomination hearing for USAID Administrator nominee Dr. Rajiv Shah, MFAN member and Oxfam VP of Policy and Advocacy Paul O’Brien appeared on CNN’s “Amanpour” to address the importance of U.S. development efforts in Afghanistan and foreign assistance reform more broadly. Check out the video below:
Archive for the ‘House’ Category
Congressman McDermott Introduces New Partnership for Trade Development Act
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
Last night, Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) introduced the New Partnership for Trade Development Act (H.R.4101), an important piece of legislation geared toward harmonizing trade and US development efforts. The act has three goals:
- To strengthen the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) by extending its benefits and focusing on trade capacity building;
- To put more fairness in US preference programs by creating a new model that extends duty-free, quota-free preferences, as well as encouraging trade and capacity building among Least Developed Countries (LDC); and,
- To simplify and extend the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) by instituting a new single rule of origin and reviewing the current GSP statutory exclusions that were first established in 1974.
To accomplish these goals, the act calls for the creation of the following:
- An Office of Trade and Competitiveness for Least Developed Countries (LDC) and African Countries in the White House that is responsible for planning, developing and coordinating trade capacity building and private sector competitiveness programs; and,
- A Trade Capacity Coordinating Committee to organize federal TCB programs, focusing on infrastructure, labor and environmental standards, trade facilitation, economic opportunity and relationships with NGOs, donors and contractors. The Committee is to be made up of the Director of the Office of Trade and Competition; the US Trade Representative; and the Secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Treasury, State and Defense.
MFAN Partners Bread for the World and CARE Testify on Obama Administration’s Global Food Security Initiative
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
On October 29th, Bread for the World President and MFAN Co-Chair Rev. David Beckmann testified at a hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health on “A Call to Action on Food Security: The Administration’s Global Strategy.”
Also on the panel were: Dr. Helene Gayle, President and Chief Executive Officer of MFAN partner organization CARE; Thomas Melito, Director, International Affairs and Trade Team at the U.S. Government Accountability Office; Julie Howard, Executive Director of the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa; and Richard Leach, Senior Advisor for Public Policy at Friends of the World Food Program.
In his testimony, Beckmann praised the Consultation Document that has been released by the State Department on the U.S. Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, calling it “a thoughtful, coherent, comprehensive approach to hunger and malnutrition.” He added that it “includes several core principles that form a blueprint for broader reform of U.S. foreign assistance that Bread for the World and the other organizations in MFAN subscribe to: investing in country-led plans; enhancing strategic coordination both within the U.S. government and among international institutions, non-governmental organizations, the private sector, and civil society; leveraging the assets and tools of existing multilateral actors; and establishing benchmarks and targets as part of transparent and accountable evaluation systems.”
Beckmann made an impassioned plea for an empowered, distinct U.S. development agency: “When we try to achieve defense and diplomatic goals with development dollars, aid is much less effective in reducing poverty. In my mind, that’s the basic reason we need a strong development agency, with its own capacity to plan and carry out programs. These programs should be coordinated with other foreign policy purposes, but distinct from them.”
He further called for the Coordinator of the administration’s food security initiative to be based out of the U.S. government’s lead development agency, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID): “Despite the fact that USAID continues to languish without an administrator, I strongly believe that the coordinator of the Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative should reside at USAID. Agriculture production in poor countries is fundamentally a development issue and should be led by our chief development agency. For far too long, we have usurped the critical responsibility of USAID to lead on the key development issues of the day through the proliferation of new entities and work-arounds. This has led to a fragmentation of our development policies so severe that it has perpetuated a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we farm out USAID’s authority, the more incoherent and convoluted our development assistance apparatus becomes.”
“We cannot afford to continue on this road. President Obama and Secretary Clinton are committed to elevating development as a coequal pillar of U.S. foreign policy alongside defense and diplomacy. To do so successfully, the U.S. government needs to have a strong and distinct development voice at the policy discussion table that can speak on behalf of development issues in a credible way. The new USAID Administrator should designate a high-level representative to coordinate the interagency efforts of the global food security initiative.”
In his other points, Beckmann urged that improved nutrition be a primary indicator of success, stating that “focusing our agriculture and food security investments on improving the nutrition of women and children will shape better, more targeted programs that have a lasting development impact… And, because nutrition is affected by other factors such as access to basic health care services and the protection of women and girls, measuring the impact of U.S. investments on the nutritional status of women and children will also tell us how well our overall development efforts are working.”
He also pushed for more consultation with civil society and governments in developing countries: “The United States should insist that the process of developing and implementing country-led food security plans include the network of local institutions focused on alleviating hunger and poverty. By including local civil society organizations, faith groups, farmer cooperatives, private voluntary organizations, and local advocacy groups in identifying problems and solutions to hunger and undernutrition, the effectiveness of U.S. investments will increase. Inclusive participation will also increase commitment at all levels, making the grants the U.S. provides more sustainable over time.”
Beckmann concluded his testimony by underscoring the historic opportunity the U.S. for foreign assistance reform: “The appetite for meaningful reform of our food security efforts – and more broadly our foreign assistance programs – is large right now. But the window of opportunity for enacting reform is small. We must collectively capitalize on this rare moment in history to help poor people around the world… To ensure its overall success, it is imperative that…the Initiative serve as a building block for lasting foreign assistance reform.”
In her testimony, Dr. Gayle called for the following elements of a successful
food security initiative: 1) flexible approaches to food assistance; 2) moving away from the practice of monetization as part of modernizing our food assistance system; 3) gender integration and women’s empowerment; and 4) the creation of social safety net systems that prevent people on the margins from falling into extreme poverty.
WWF US CEO Takes Reform Message to Capitol Hill
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
As we noted yesterday, WWF US President and CEO Carter Roberts, one of the world’s leading conservationists, has a unique view on foreign assistance reform. Today, he brought his message to Capitol Hill for a bi-cameral hearing on the innovative Congo Basin Forest Partnership (CBFP), hosted by Rep. Ed Royce (D-CA), chair of the International Conservation Caucus. In his testimony at the hearing, Roberts drew important links between conservation and foreign assistance reform:
“More work should also be done, for the benefit of the Congo Basin and other developing countries, by the U.S. government to modernize its foreign assistance. We are in need of an overarching development strategy that recognizes the critical importance of securing the underlying natural resource base. We need a USAID Administrator and a strengthened development agency to carry out programs like the model CBFP in other regions and scale up efforts to meet pressing natural resource challenges. And we need to help build the capacity of civil society and governments within these regions so that host countries will own these programs and assure their sustainability into the future.”
For more information on the hearing, click here.
For more information on WWF’s foreign assistance reform work, click here.
MFAN Principal: President Obama and the Spirit of Global Development Partnership
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
The following blog post by MFAN Principal Noam Unger, fellow and policy director of the Foreign Assistance Reform project at the Brookings Institution, was originally published on the Brookings website and at Huffingtonpost.com.
In his rousing speech at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative yesterday, President Obama tied together his administration’s recurrent themes of international collaboration, public-private cooperation, and service. By planting these themes in the context of our highly globalized world—the ways in which it presents real opportunities and grave threats, Obama struck chords resonant with his campaign’s global development and democracy policy statement to “strengthen our common security by investing in our common humanity.”
The key feature of his speech was a call for a new spirit of global partnership, emphasizing that real progress in lifting millions out of poverty and countering transnational threats cannot be made by governments alone. The president declared his desire for this spirit to guide his administration and he referred to it as “a defining feature of our foreign policy.”
It is heartening to hear the president say “we’re renewing development as a key element of American foreign policy,” and he is right to place significant importance on the role of public-private partnerships and service. Of course the devil is in the details.
In a piece we wrote this summer, Brookings colleagues Homi Kharas, Johannes Linn and I recommended elevating global development on the administration’s agenda and we commented on key elements of reforming U.S. global development policies and operations: leadership, strategy and legislation.
On the issue of partnerships, there are a number of straightforward steps the U.S. government could take to advance global development efforts. These are presented in Strengthening America’s Global Development Partnerships: A Policy Blueprint for Better Collaboration Between the U.S. Government, Business and Civil Society, a paper I wrote with Jane Nelson, another Brookings colleague who is also the director of the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard and a Director of the International Business Leaders Forum. Here’s the brief summary:
In the face of compounding global crises threatening development, the outdated U.S. foreign assistance system must catch up to a changed landscape of influential actors including corporations, mega-foundations, faith-based organizations and other non-governmental groups. Within the context of broader foreign assistance reform, the Obama administration and Congress have an opportunity to retool official U.S. efforts to more effectively and efficiently support global development by adapting to this new ecosystem. This paper offers recommendations on how the U.S. government can better position itself by:
- Strengthening its capabilities to make innovative and strategic investments;
- Encouraging cross-sector partnerships aligned with core competencies;
- Promoting international service, professional exchanges and citizen engagement;
- Supporting development of global norms and guidelines; and
- Leveraging the bully pulpit to mobilize stakeholders.
To understand the tie-ins to Obama’s service agenda, it is also worth checking out analysis by Brookings’ Initiative on International Volunteering and Service. In his CGI speech, Obama linked domestic and international service. This approach presents real potential for global development efforts. As Jane and I note in our paper, new models at home may also apply overseas. The lessons that will be learned as the White House
Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation fine-tunes its programs—including an innovation and replication fund to invest in proven approaches to poverty alleviation—could also accelerate progress through similar efforts on the global development front.
The effort to fundamentally upgrade U.S. global development policies and operations is still gearing up. With policy reviews underway at the White House and the State Department, and with legislation percolating in both the House and the Senate, momentum is apparent. The degree to which these different efforts move in the same direction—toward more effective development policies and implementation—will determine whether the U.S. can restore its leadership on these issues. The effectiveness of programs in the field are directly linked to Washington efforts to make development more coherent, better resourced, and suitably oriented toward partnerships with other key actors—including multilateral organizations, other government donors, international business and civil society, and, most notably, the recipients.
