On December 15th, MFAN Partner InterAction released a paper titled “Country Ownership: Moving from Rhetoric to Action,” which aims to address the wide range of explanations and varying methods of promotion that have led to the issue’s unorganized discussions and approaches.
On Tuesday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the World Bank hosted an event, Building Capacity for Trade in Developing Countries: Fostering Public and Private Cooperation in Aid for Trade. As Tom Donohue, President of the Chamber said when he opened the afternoon’s event, “There have never been so many opportunities for business and government to break down barriers to trade as now.” Click here to read more.
Click here to read the second installment of MFAN’s blog series highlighting the reform aspects of Feed the Future, the United States Government’s global hunger and food security initiative. Feed the Future incorporates many key reform principles such as components of country ownership, strong monitoring and evaluation, and leveraging partnerships for enhanced results. In this week’s post, Rick Leach, President and CEO of World Food Program USA focuses on both the short and long-term goals for food security as well as the importance of a comprehensive approach.
MFAN is thrilled to kick off a blog series on the reform aspects of Feed the Future. The first post in the series is from Mannik Sakayan, Senior Policy Analyst at Bread for the World. Be sure to check back in the coming weeks as we feature posts from World Food Program USA, ActionAid, the Partnership to Cut Hunger and Poverty in Africa, and the German Marshall Fund.
At one point Shah said, “We have spent a lot of time listening and learning about how we can do this work better, more effectively. And the number one thing we’ve learned is we need to be more capable of supporting country-owned efforts and building real capacity through our investments around the world.”
Last week, MFAN Partner the Center for American Progress teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research to host a joint event: The Road to Better Aid: An Emerging Bipartisan Consensus? Daniel Yohannes, CEO of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, gave the keynote address followed by a panel discussion with MFAN Principal John Norris, Executive Director of the Sustainable Security and Peacebuilding Initiative at CAP and Mauro De Lorenzo, Visiting Fellow at AEI. Philip I. Levy, Resident Scholar at AEI moderated the discussion.
One year ago this week, a devastating earthquake leveled Haiti taking with it the lives of nearly 300,000 and leaving a capital city and a nation in ruins. President Obama has said that while “countless lives” have been saved with increased access to basic services, “too much rubble continues to clog the streets, too many people are still living in tents, and for so many Haitians progress has not come fast enough.” On Tuesday, Oxfam America with New Jersey Democrat, Representative Albio Sires, hosted a distinguished group of panelist on Capitol Hill on how the US government is promoting country ownership and building more effective institutions in Haiti 12 months later.
“The new approach will not offer assistance in perpetuity, but instead support the creation of institutions and conditions that get to the causes of the poverty rather than just slapping on temporary band-aids. It is a vision rooted in one word: ownership. It would mean that the US invests more into supporting efforts designed, led, and controlled by poor countries.”
“While there is much to applaud in the report, its shift towards a national security foundation for diplomacy and development raises significant concerns among development professionals. Over time, how this affects the planning and selection of development solutions at both State and USAID could result in an undercutting of the elevation of development which the QDDR asserts as one of its key goals. Furthermore, how the reforms outlined in the report are implemented will determine whether humanitarian and development programs in the field are strengthened or weakened.”
In a new policy brief called “Consultation & Participation for Local Ownership: What? Why? How?,” MFAN Partner Save the Children examines how to make the Obama Administration’s emphasis on “country ownership” a successful model for stakeholder participation in development programs.
