See below for a guest post by Andrea Koppel, Vice President of Global Engagement and Policy at Mercy Corps and MFAN Executive Committee member.
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I have a confession to make. I may have a serious day job fighting for better policies to help vulnerable people around the world, but after hours I’m an avid consumer of tabloids. Grocery store check-out lines – the longer the better. Hair salons – I don’t mind waiting. Airport kiosks are my preferred venue for binge reading. I’d choose a salacious, rumor-mongering US magazine over the more serious, well-sourced Foreign Affairs any day of the week.
Even at the uber intellectual State Department it’s hard to compete against sexy. Take for example ongoing discussions around selecting overarching foreign policy and development objectives for the next four years – a document known as the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR II).
Good luck making that short list. With titillating topics such as climate change, which Secretary of State John Kerry calls “as big a threat as terrorism”, and exciting new ventures such as USAID’s Global Development Lab, “management reform” risks being ignored like a wonky wallflower.
But just as a wealthy older man believes he’ll attract a trophy wife, I’d like to believe that much needed “management reform” will still catch the eye of QDDR II’s head honcho Tom Perriello. If you read beyond the headline to see just how valuable these reforms can be – both in terms of efficiencies and impact – there’s a lot to like.
Let’s face it – while global poverty has decreased over the last 25 years, the number of extremely poor people has stayed about the same in the most fragile and conflict-affected countries. By 2018, roughly half of the world’s extreme poor will live in fragile states. Many of these countries are of strategic importance to the U.S., yet they are also places where U.S. or international assistance has had little success in breaking cycles of conflict or poverty, despite two decades of concerted international development and humanitarian responses. To try to figure out why that’s been the case, the Mercy Corps Policy and Advocacy team interviewed more than two dozen of our most experienced colleagues – many of whom live and work in these tough places.
Our conclusion is that if the Obama administration is to truly build momentum for its ambitious policy directive to eradicate extreme poverty in the world by 2030, it must address five distinct, yet interconnected problems:
1. U.S. conflict mitigation and management structures are disproportionately oriented towards crisis response, rather than crisis prevention or resilience building.
2. Few funding mechanisms address the underlying causes of extreme poverty or chronic insecurity.
3. Foreign assistance frameworks do not effectively target or reach the extreme poor.
4. Grant and contracting mechanisms discourage adaptive programming.
5. Assistance frameworks hinder, rather than cultivate new forms of partnerships and market-based solutions that can reach the extreme poor at scale in fragile states.
[Read Mercy Corps’ recommendations in our memo “Managing Chaos”.]
When I got home from work the other night, the latest issues of Rolling Stone and The Economist magazines had arrived in my mailbox. Of course I picked up Rolling Stone first to read about Melissa McCarthy, the break-out star of “Bridesmaids.” And that got me thinking.
In “Bridesmaids,” McCarthy was the antithesis of a hot Hollywood babe. But her character was immune to what others thought of her. She was supremely confident, and in the end, she landed the guy she wanted. So maybe I shouldn’t worry that the packaging of “management reform” isn’t seductive enough, at first glance, to make the QDDR II short list. Maybe it has a shot after all. All joking aside, I really hope it does because the future of the world’s poorest people depends on it.