Today, MFAN Partner Save the Children released a brief four-page paper on principles to support country ownership, “Supporting Local Ownership and Building National Capacity: Applying a flexible and country-based approach to aid instruments.”
MFAN Partner Oxfam America co-hosted an auxiliary session yesterday with Management Sciences for Health (MSH) on “Can Country Ownership Work? Field Perspectives on Health Systems Strengthening.”
“Africa is approaching an economic, political, and social tipping point, and smart donor support that leads to the empowerment of ordinary people is needed at this moment of risk and opportunity,” said Githongo, who runs the NGO Inuka Kenya Trust. “Ownership is ni sisi. It is up to us. It is us who own our problems. And it is us who will come up with the solutions.”
Oxfam sees improving information about aid programs as the first step for donor countries, like the U.S., to be supportive and more responsive to country priorities.
Amb. Mark Green, Managing Director of the Malaria Policy Center, continues his series of blog articles about why conservatives should care about foreign assistance reform. Read on to learn why foreign assistance reform is a great opportunity for Conservatives to reaffirm values and initiatives we care about.
“I believe the next 12 to 18 months is a unique point in time. I don’t think the window will last much longer than that. And I think we have to do this in this moment.”
The bigger question is how to craft what the strategy calls a ‘whole of government approach’ that can coordinate planning and policymaking and create ‘a deliberate and inclusive interagency process’ to ‘balance and integrate all elements of American power and update our national security capacity for the 21st century.’
MFAN Principal Noam Unger, Global Economy and Development Fellow at the Brookings Institution, comments on last week’s release of the Obama Administration’s first National Security Strategy (NSS), and calls for the President to deliver a U.S. Global Development Strategy to expand upon what was laid out in the NSS.
Jono Quick, President & CEO of Management Sciences for Health writes about the importance of local ownership in development saying that, “Development resources, strategically invested and wisely managed, can build local systems that have a large scale, lasting impact.”
On May 20, 2010, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs hosted a day-long symposium on Agriculture and Food Security. Dr. Rajiv Shah, USAID Administrator, delivered the keynote address and shared the U.S. Government’s implementation strategy for its global hunger and food security initiative, now called “Feed the Future.” Feed the Future demonstrates adherence to key foreign assistance reform principles in accelerating progress toward the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.
