NSC Official Reaffirms Obama Pledge to Double Foreign Aid
FrontLines - August 2009
The Obama administration intends to honor a campaign pledge to double foreign assistance
and has asked for money to hire more USAID Foreign Service Officers, said Gayle Smith of the National Security Council (NSC) in a speech to the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA).
“AID is being asked to do more with less and that is something
that needs to be rectified very quickly,” said Smith, special
assistant to the president on international development issues at the NSC.
“The president, both as president
and during the campaign,” said Smith, “singles out development,
as distinct from diplomacy and defense [as an area] that we need to give much more weight and authority to.”
Smith spoke June 9 at a meeting
of ACVFA, an advisory body of 30 private citizens with extensive
knowledge of international development—many of whom lead organizations that carry out USAID programs.
She noted that during the Bush administration, the military
got “the lion’s share of the increase in foreign assistance,” but eventually defense leaders
“recognized in Iraq and Afghanistan that military means alone would not be sufficient to its task, that it needed to use civilian development tools.”
And as globalization took root, other U.S. government agencies also got involved in development such as the Departments of Treasury, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Education, and Energy.
“This can lead to a great deal of confusion when there are multiple
U.S. representatives in the field at the same time,” she said.
She also noted there is now “a new focus on measurements,” which was the main topic at the ACVFA meeting: the current status of monitoring and evaluation
at USAID.
“When the government, NGOs, and the United Nations can show that for dollars spent there are quantifiable returns, this counters the perception that all aid falls in the path of corruption
or is misspent,” said Smith, who worked as a journalist in Africa for 20 years for the BBC, Associated Press, Reuters, and several newspapers.
But even if quantifiable elements
can be measured, it does not necessarily mean that a developing
country’s health systems have been built up enough to deal with the next major health crisis it will face, she said.
She called for:
- the development community to become more flexible, saying that Congress and the executive
branch need to loosen their bureaucratic restrictions and give “greater freedom from those things and greater agility without sacrificing accountability.”
- development professionals to stop using technical jargon that lets development be seen as “a boring,
bureaucratic activity that isn’t about what we all know it is about, which is changing people’s lives.”
- educating NGOs, private-sector investors, social entrepreneurs, and others about what development really entails.
During the session, Stephen Moseley, president of the Academy for Educational Development, asked how development
aid, if used to meet security needs, could avoid being subordinated
to the needs of defense.
Smith said diplomacy defense and development are intertwined. If an elected government replaces an authoritarian regime, for example, the U.S. government may need to provide aid quickly. Other times aid may be provided as an incentive in a diplomatic negotiation.
She said that sustainable development is a long-term policy imperative.
“Until governments can provide
social services, people see a tangible peace or a democracy dividend, there are pathways to jobs and a future, and jobs are more available than guns…we are not going to see stability or security,”
she concluded.
★
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