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- 02/06/12: Remarks by Donald Steinberg, Deputy Administrator, US Agency for International Development - Beyond Victimhood: The Crucial Role of Marginalized Groups in Building Peace
- 02/02/12: Statement of Dr. Sarah E. Mendelson, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights - U.S. Policy toward Post-Election Democratic Republic of the Congo
- 01/20/12: Remarks by USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah at the Environment and Security Conference, Washington, DC
- 01/19/12: Remarks by USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC - U.S. Aid and Transparency for Global Development
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This is an archived USAID document retained on this web site as a matter of public record.
Remarks by William J. Garvelink
Acting Assistant Administrator,
Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance
United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
"Saving Lives: the Right Information for the Right Decision"
Labouisse Hall, UNICEF House
Three United Nations Plaza, New York
June 23, 2005
Thank you, Ann, for the kind invitation to co-chair this session. We're especially glad to have this opportunity to work closely with you again. We believe our partnership on this initiative will benefit the world's neediest populations. I have the honor of representing Administrator Natsios who was unable to be here. He sends his and our Agency's whole-hearted support for this important meeting.
Thank you to Ambassador Siv for participating in this meeting. We know his keen interest in good stewardship of UN resources and U.S taxpayers' money. He will be pleased to hear that USAID and the SMART initiative are contributing towards our United States government priorities on this issue.
As the United States Government's lead agency for humanitarian assistance, including famine relief, USAID provides assistance to people on the criterion of urgent need, regardless of the character of their governments. The guiding principle for our humanitarian assistance is outlined in our White Paper on "U.S. Foreign Aid: Meeting the Challenges of the Twenty-first Century" that outlines the five core missions of USAID. One of our five missions is "providing humanitarian relief to meet immediate human needs in countries afflicted by natural disaster, violent conflict, political crisis, or persistent dire poverty." Our guiding principle reflects our concern for saving lives and reflects the generosity and kindness of the American people.
These commitments are long-standing. They have not changed in the course of American history nor will they be shortchanged today. What has changed is the historic context in which we act. Since the end of the Cold War, the world has been a proliferation of civil conflict and regional wars. Humanitarian assistance increasingly takes place within the context of fragile states, which present some of the more intractable and urgent national security problems that the country faces. We live in a world where enormous responsibility falls to the U.S. to use its global reach and capacity to address needs and challenges.
Besides helping those in dire need, we have the responsibility to ensure the good use of U.S. taxpayers' money. To meet the unprecedented challenges of today, USAID is aggressively pursuing management reform that includes improving program accountability, sound management and organizational excellence. We're emphasizing better monitoring, more focused strategies and programs, and greater flexibility to respond to changing conditions.
We selected the indicators on mortality rate and nutritional status in 1999 to improve our program accountability. These are being reinforced through SMART to better understand if USAID and our partners are affecting the lives of those we seek to help. We're also pleased our early work is contributing to the community's adoption of these indicators to gauge the performance of the humanitarian system as a whole. The use of these indicators is premised by the reality that the USG alone cannot meet the needs of the world's humanitarian need. These indicators are best for monitoring our collective effort.
Crude Death Rate (CDR) and Nutritional Status of Children Under-Five are useful for policy and decision makers as they provide an overall gauge of the well-being of a population. For decision making, we need a few critical pieces of information that are reliable rather than an overabundance of information that is not. These outcome level indicators work well with other information such as the number of people affected, displacement, security and access information.
The work undertaken by the SMART Initiative is critical to improving our understanding of the scale and nature of humanitarian crises. Decision makers need to know and justify: (1) whether to intervene, (2) the nature and scale of the intervention, and (3) how to prioritize resources that are increasingly being stretched to meet unprecedented needs.
Ideally, decisions about responses should be properly informed by understanding comparative levels of need. The information we need is often not available. Besides being readily available, information we use should be reliable and technically sound. The development of the SMART methodology and the support system being established is of critical importance as it provides a real, practical tool to move us towards reform and excellence.
We're pleased to have played a role in initiating SMART. We hope we'll continue to make a contribution during this next phase of implementation, in coordination with UNICEF.
We appreciate the participation of our implementing partners at this meeting. We encourage them to try the SMART methodology, and tell us how to improve it, because "we need the right information for the right decision to save lives."
Thank you.
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