Foreign Aid

Overview Though the United States of America faces its toughest budgetary and economic challenges since the Great Depression, it cannot afford to eliminate, or even reduce, its foreign assistance spending. For clear reasons of political influence, national security, global stability, and humanitarian concern the United States must, at a minimum, stay the course in its commitments to global health and development, as well as basic humanitarian relief. The Bush administration sought not only to increase some aspects of foreign assistance, targeting key countries (Iraq and Afghanistan) and specific health targets, such as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the President’s Malaria Initiative, but also executed an array of programmatic and structural changes in U.S. aid efforts. By 2008, it was obvious to most participants and observers that too many agencies were engaged in foreign assistance, and that programs lacked coherence and strategy. Well before the financial crisis of fall 2008, there was a strong bipartisan call for foreign assistance reform, allowing greater efficiency and credibility to U.S. efforts, enhancing engagement in multilateral institutions and programs, and improving institutional relations between U.S. agencies and their partners, including nongovernmental organizations, recipient governments, corporate and business sector stakeholders, faith-based organizations, academic-based implementers and researchers, foundations and private donors, United Nations agencies, and other donor nations. This report describes: A brief lay of the foreign assistance landscape, outlining the current status of U.S. investment in health and development, the global donor panorama, basic needs assessment for poor countries, and forecast needs levels for 2009 to 2015; The rationale for continued, robust American engagement in foreign assistance, not just in spite of the economic downturn, but because of it; A consensus view of what works, what needs to be improved, and what still needs to be examined regarding how the U.S. planned and executed foreign assistance in fiscal year 2007 to fiscal year 2008; Consensus recommendations for the future of foreign aid under a new presidential administration and Congress.

Overview Around the world, 72 million primary-school-aged children and another 226 million adolescents will not attend school this year. While global awareness of the silent crisis of education in developing nations has been growing, education has not experienced the large increases in resource mobilization that have taken place in support of HIV/AIDS, debt relief, and malaria over the last ten years. This shortfall in funding has raised the question as to whether the world needs a new Global Education Fund to elevate education on the global agenda. In this Center for Universal Education Working Paper, Gene B. Sperling argues that there are important design elements of the existing global education architecture—the Education for All Fast Track Initiative—that reflect a promising model for a coordinated, global effort on education that should be built upon. Yet he also finds that a new Global Education Fund must employ serious reforms and have a major rebranding and relaunching moment by heads of state that mobilizes a greater global commitment to more resources and sound program implementation to make significant steps toward achieving quality universal education for the world’s poorest children.

Overview The cost of food is soaring, threatening many poor countries with famine. Among the most acute cases is Myanmar, where Cyclone Nargis has rendered an estimated 1.5 million homeless and destroyed vast tracts of agricultural land. Political leaders in the capitals of Europe, Asia, and North America understandably feel the need to take action, moving millions of tons of rice and other foodstuffs into hard-hit areas. But the roots of the global food crisis run deep, and many of the quickest responses could do great harm in the long run. Without appropriately diagnosing the causes of the crisis, well-intentioned treatments could fail or even exacerbate the situation. In this Center for Geoeconomic Studies Working Paper, Laurie A. Garrett addresses the mistakes in humanitarian food polices and maps out a better way forward.