Where to now on U.S. foreign aid?

With its origins in a research project, Unlock USAID has grown into a collaboration of interested social innovators who share the common goal of reinventing how the United States does international development and humanitarian response. Led by Amanda Arch and Walter Kerr, their movement’s reach is extensive, and they have achieved significant level of credibility through a highly participatory mode of operations embracing academia, social enterprises, philanthropies, and multinationals from more than 20 countries. Their self-declared goal is to influence the shape and direction of the public institutions that ought to lead American funded foreign aid into the future. There is little doubt that fundamental changes are needed if U.S. foreign aid is to survive the political headwinds it will surely face in the rapidly approaching “America First” world of Donald Trump. 

The largest of U.S. institutions that administers our non-military foreign assistance – the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – has accomplished much since it was founded under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. USAID has expanded into global health, democracy promotion, climate change concerns, gender equity and women’s empowerment, democracy and governance promotion, education, technology and A.I., agriculture and food production, and energy, among other sectors. It carries out all this activity and related programming with less than 1% of the federal budget (making the U.S. among the least generous of all OECD countries in foreign aid). 

What USAID has failed miserably at achieving is building a constituency of support among the American public. Granted, Congress never funded USAID to carry out this important public outreach and awareness function at scale, but the public’s lack of knowledge and the misinformation about the realities, budget, and impact of American foreign aid through USAID and the other key federal organizations carrying out this work is stunning.

In their own words, Unlock Aid advocates that: 

“A new U.S. approach to global development should be centered on decentralizing decision-making and shifting more resources and decision-making power to those closest to the challenges, investing far more resources in ways that promote sustainable economic growth, decoupling humanitarian response from long-term development investments, and better leveraging innovation to solve the hardest problems of our time. The U.S. needs to restructure its global development architecture to achieve this vision, complete with new mission statements, new human resources systems, greater transparency, a mandate to act with greater urgency and agility, and an orientation toward delivering results. Underpinning all these principles, the U.S. must also lead by example and hold itself accountable to the same standards that it expects and demands of others.”

Unlock USAID’s approach is highly pragmatic, resting on strong political-economy foundations, while favoring infusing our foreign aid institutions and their operations with operating principles based on “economic growth rooted in sound industrial policies”. This sounds more like advocacy for manufacturing better widgets at affordable prices than engaging in a sector that is supposed to be about expanding human freedoms, opportunities, capabilities, agency, equity, dignity, and  human and environmental well-being.

The Unlock Aid movement is making a welcome push toward much greater agency and control by local partners in shaping their own development, which would require a shift away from the project and program orientation of USAID at present. Instead, Unlock USAID favors an expansion of the kind of compacts between the U.S. and a partner country that the Millennium Challenge Corporation is best known for, investment collaboration with large multinationals, specific institutional strengthening investments into agencies and financial mechanisms that can drive positive social impact, and the use of cutting-edge, sophisticated financial tools to encourage development progress and sustainability.

Importantly, in one instance Unlock USAID does take a principled moral stand, as it challenges the U.S. government to step up to the plate and end the hypocrisy that is so corrosive to foreign aid:

“The U.S. cannot fund and defend destructive forces around the globe while simultaneously claiming to support democracy, human rights and development and expect the rest of the world to take it seriously. The U.S. can’t insist that it cares about peace and the planet while engaging in exploitation and extraction. It can’t claim to be helping to prevent the next pandemic while it also hoards excess vaccines and essential medicines.”

Altogether, there is much to like and to support in the efforts of Unlock USAID. Unfortunately, there are also some glaring omissions, starting with addressing why we ought to be engaged in foreign aid at all. 

Foreign aid was advocated for by President John F. Kennedy using language that was fundamentally and unashamedly moral:

“There is no escaping our obligations: our moral obligations as a wise leader and good neighbor in the interdependent community of free nations – our economic obligations as the wealthiest people in a world of largely poor people, as a nation no longer dependent upon the loans from abroad that once helped us develop our own economy – and our political obligations as the single largest counter to the adversaries of freedom.”

What has happened? Do we as a country no longer recognize any moral obligation to lend a hand in alleviating poverty abroad, supporting human flourishing where there is now mostly human suffering, advocating for the recognition and respect of universal, equal human dignity, being a champion of democratic values, and in protecting our planet and the environment that we all depend on for our existence? 

Unlock USAID is exceptionally thin on moral discourse, and in considering the moral and ethical implications of the growing interdependence of all countries and peoples. While many of the operational and technical measures proposed by Unlock USAID warrant careful consideration, we cannot simply dismiss that there must be a driver for our aid. Efficiency and effectiveness as goals are necessary but insufficient – we have to care, and care deeply.

Another significant missing element from Unlock USAID’s analyses is the role of civil society. This absence is remarkable, given how many of the major actors funded by USAID to be active in humanitarian response and international development are nonprofit civil society organizations with strong convictions to meet their well-articulated moral objectives, in both their means of operations and in their goals of supporting human and environmental flourishing. By excising the whole civil society sector from their analysis, Unlock USAID also eliminates from consideration what little moral deliberation that still takes place among development and humanitarian agencies. 

Unlock USAID is a start, and an important one. Its analysis and advocacy may already be too late, however, to win a place in the American psyche and in our political priorities to keep U.S. foreign aid meaningful and something more than a crude tool of national self-interest.

Photo Credit: simarik, Turkey