A plan to fight the MDGs is a great stepping stone in fighting global poverty, but it’s not the whole story. If the US is committed to fighting global poverty, President Obama needs to deliver a global development strategy at the upcoming MDG Summit.
If, in fact, this sense of compassion and moral obligation is part of what underpins our foreign assistance – from disaster relief to helping tackle the AIDS pandemic – then this same sense should push us to make sure we do it as effectively as possible. As individuals, each of us makes choices as to the charities we’re going to support with our hard earned money.
In this regard, we’ve advocated with MFAN for significant reforms. These include an adoption of a national development strategy by the U.S. government, which is an effort that seems to have been successful; a rewrite of the U.S. Foreign Assistance Act, and we’ve been closely engaged with Congress on the details of what a new Foreign Assistance Act would look like; and a shift to ensure greater country ownership of U.S. Foreign Assistance.
“This is a major step toward building a 21st-century approach and apparatus for promoting development, which President Obama’s first National Security Strategy (NSS) called a “moral, strategic, and economic imperative” for the U.S. It is also a long overdue step, as U.S. foreign assistance legislation has not been overhauled since President Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.”
MFAN Partner the German Marshall Fund of the United States this week hosted a discussion on a new paper that offers a model for a U.S. Global Development Strategy. The paper was written by MFAN Principal and GMF Senior Resident Fellow Jim Kunder and MFAN member Jonathan White, senior program officer at GMF. The paper, titled “The Roadmap for a Grand Bargain: Comments on a U.S. Global Development Strategy,” draws from existing foreign assistance approaches and recent support from the Obama Administration and Congress for the notion of formulating the United States’ first-ever global development strategy for the 21st century.
“More concerning is that State and USAID have had little interaction to date with staff writing the new bill. This doesn’t bode well for striking a grand bargain between the administration and Congress on either a new development direction (which will likely require some legislation) or passing a new global partnership act (which will require support from the administration, including State and USAID).”
See below for an invitation to an upcoming event, next Wednesday, brought to you by MFAN and the Global Health Technologies Coalition: Innovation to Catalyze Development: Leveraging Research in Foreign Assistance Wednesday, July 28, 2010 Capitol Visitor Center Room SVC 210/212 12:30 – 2:30 pm Lunch will be served The United States is set to … Continue reading MFAN and GHTC to Co-Host Event on Innovation and Foreign Aid
“The opinion about the United States in Pakistan will change when the people of Pakistan see how, through this partnership, their lives have changed.”
“Absent direct, personal intervention by President Obama to define his own vision of aid reform and to take the actions needed to enforce the reforms, the stalemate will continue, and plans to strengthen the third D will suffer.”
“At a policy level, the administration should be commended for its approach to development…Progress on actual nuts and bolts of turning policy into action has been less forthcoming. It is time to act on the broad recognition that multiple agencies carrying out similar or inconsistent programs is not good practice; that assistance programs need greater transparency and accountability; and that the legislative foundation for our foreign assistance system, a 500-page Cold War-era statute, lacks clear goals and objectives and is bursting at the seams with outdated, overlapping, and duplicative and conflicting provisions.”
