Q and A with
Brian Atwood,
Former USAID
Administrator
FrontLines - December-January 2009-10
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Brian Atwood
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J. Brian Atwood served as administrator of USAID from 1992
to 1998. Currently, he is dean of the Humphrey School of Public
Affairs at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He was in
Washington to address the USAID Mission Directors Conference
Dec. 2 and spoke with FrontLines Editorial Director Ben Barber
by phone Dec. 7, 2009.
Q: The United States has
been delivering foreign assistance
for more than 50 years.
Do you see a time when the
world will not need aid?
ATWOOD: Probably not.
There will always be pockets
of poverty that will need treatment
and people who really
want to receive the aid for
self-help purposes, as opposed
to humanitarian relief. But I
can see progress made in combating
extreme poverty. But I
would point out that aid is
only one part of the equation.
Having coherent policies in
the trade and finance, agriculture,
and environment areas
also is extremely important in
dealing with poverty.
Q: What are the most important
areas for USAID to invest in?
ATWOOD: Democracy and
governance and economic systems,
creating the microeconomic
systems that help countries
to produce prosperity, and
the democratic governance systems
that enable them to sustain
that economic growth. For
example: tax systems that work,
banking systems that provide
loans to small businesses, customs
systems that work at the
ports so that people can import
and export, commercial codes
that ensure that there is less arbitrary
behavior in the economy,
and legal and political systems
that reflect the peoples’ will.
Q: What advice would you
have for the new USAID
administrator?
ATWOOD: Well, we have a
very talented person who’s
been nominated for this job,
and I assume by the time this appears, he will have been confirmed.
He needs to be both a
moral leader and the person who
reminds people about what the
United States is all about. He has
a unique capacity to do that.
He’s a first-generation American.
He is a medical doctor. He
needs to lead this agency back to
what it was because it’s been
somewhat demoralized in recent
years. He has the energy and the
brainpower to do this job and do
it really well.
Q: What were the top accomplishments
of USAID when you
were administrator?
ATWOOD: Well, the easy
answer is to say that we saved the
agency when it was threatened,
but there were many other things
that we did that caused the
agency to be saved. One was to
put in place a results-based system
so we could measure against
strategic goals. And I think that’s
worked very well. I’ve spoken to
more recent aid administrators
and that business model continues
to be used to this day.
We also put in place the Office
of Transition Initiatives, which
has become relevant in that gray
area between humanitarian relief
and long-term development,
bringing about reconciliation in
post-conflict societies. We put a
lot of emphasis on democracy
and governance before it was all
that popular within the development
community. We started the
process within the DAC [Development
Assistance Committee]
that created the strategic goals for
the 21st century that became the
MDGs [Millennium Development
Goals]. Those are some of
the contributions we made.
Q: U.S. newspapers generally
report only the problems or the failures of foreign aid programs;
how can a more complete story
be told to the U.S. public?
ATWOOD: We went to places
like Seattle, Boston, Baltimore,
the Appalachians with a program
called “Lessons Without Borders”
and had our development
people talk to experts locally
who were working on either
inner-city problems or the problems
of rural Appalachia.
Tom Friedman [New York
Times columnist] wrote a frontpage
story about our bringing up
the immunization rate in Baltimore
thanks to learning about
how we did it in Nairobi, Kenya,
actually using materials developed
by Johns Hopkins University
right there in Baltimore.
Q: Is there a prohibition against
USAID buying time on television
or distributing materials in
the United States to tell about its
successes?
ATWOOD: The only prohibition
is that in my day, the [congressional]
committees cut down on
the number of resources available
to do that kind of work. It’s called
development education. It is a
public service to explain what
your government is doing. And if
it weren’t for the lack of resources,
I think it’s perfectly appropriate—
in fact, absolutely essential—that
the taxpayer understand what their
resources are being used for.
I just think that development
education is extraordinarily
important, as it has proven to be
in places like Scandinavia and
the Netherlands and other countries
where there is a great deal
more support for development
and a better understanding of
why it serves our broader
national interests to pursue it.
Q: What would you have done
differently while you were
administrator?
ATWOOD: Well, I was administrator
during a very difficult
period when our operating budget
was cut way back by the Congress
and we had to close several missions.
The deepest regret I had
was having to go through a reduction
in force [cutting USAID staff]
in addition to closing missions. So
it was not an easy period to be
administrator. I think I would have
done anything to avoid that, but I
didn’t believe I had the choice.
Q: Since the United States
was attacked on 9/11 and it
came out of a failed state—
Afghanistan—do you think
that foreign aid has now
become a nonpartisan issue?
ATWOOD: I think it has
become more strongly bipartisan
because President Bush,
at least rhetorically, elevated
the mission. He talked about
the three Ds—defense, diplomacy,
and development. And
now, Hillary Clinton is using
the same words, basically—
the three Ds and the need to
elevate the development mission.
And you have bipartisan
support for aid reform in both
the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee and the House
Foreign Affairs Committee,
as well as the appropriations
committees. So I think that
this is a period when the stars
seem to be aligning in support
of an effective aid program.
Q: The United States is sending
foreign aid to conflict zones
such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan. How does this affect
the development mission of
USAID?
ATWOOD: Well, I think the
best people to deal with these
situations are AID professionals,
but it does place a drain on
what I call the prevention side
of the house. If we keep being
overwhelmed by crises like
this, we are not going to have
the resources to invest, along
with other donors, in partnerships
with countries that may
be more fragile and may fall
into crisis in the future. So I
think it’s extremely important
that we increase our investment
in prevention.
Q: What should USAID prepare
for in the future?
ATWOOD: One is the climate
change negotiations that
will be going on in December
in Copenhagen. These offer an
opportunity for the developed
world—that has contributed
mostly to this problem—to
help countries in the developing
world with clean technologies
and sources of energy and
the preservation of rainforests.
We can use the legacy of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions that we have created to shift resources from north to south for development purposes in those areas.
That and the global recession and realizing how interdependent we all are in terms of economics and the food crisis that we’ve been going through—I think we’re going to have to devote a lot more time and energy in those areas. That’s why USAID needs a very strong policy staff and a strong technical staff to be a leader within the U.S. government on these issues.
★
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