Kampuchea Crossings

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foreign aid

Persistent myths about foreign aid

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Ward
A hospital supported by the German Technical Cooperation in Kampot, Cambodia

No, we do not spend 28% of the budget on aid. The actual figure is less than 0.7% (eg less than 1%).

There’s no shortage of polls that demonstrate just how uninformed people are on a range of everyday topics. I certainly might bump the stats against Americans myself if interviewed. But a curious myth that just won’t die is how much of the budget Americans think goes to foreign aid. With so many clarifications across news and edutainment sources, why do people hold on to the belief that foreign aid is bankrupting the country??

No, foreign aid is not all about altruism.

There must be hundreds of (google-able) essays on the objectives of foreign aid, and it isn’t about helping the poor. Perhaps people on the ground, like me for instance, are on this career track because we truly wish to make a difference. But the poverty industry wasn’t conceived nor even pretends to be anything less than a political tool and economic stimulus for the donor country.

I have to repost Dan Holliday’s response on Quora, to the question “What is the purpose of US foreign aid contributions?”

US foreign aid does a number of extraordinarily important things to a number of nations who are critical to the USA.  Total US Government provided foreign aid (Military, Domestic, Economic, Etc) was about $53 billion in 2011.  The payback of that aid is often times greater than the gift and even when not, the secondary and tertiary benefits are often times priceless:

  • For starters, USAmerican Aid typically comes with “strings attached”.  To be certain a good amount is just “hey, look at how nice we are” kind of aid, but Military aid (which was about $15 billion in 2011) is never, NEVER altruistic and such aid usually require said nation to either buy war materiels directly from the USA or — in other cases — just simplifies the process by having the federal government just buy the arms itself and ship them over on military transport.
  • Often times, civilian aid works the same way and is in the form of “stuff” that the USA buys from our own companies and ships over, or requires that government to engage an American company and purchase a needed product.
  • Many times a type of aid opens doors to American corporations for future usage as well.  In the case of Nigeria, US aid helps grease the palms of the Nigerian government in favor of using USAmerican contractors to conduct business (without an express, written requirement to do so, that is).
  • US Aid may oftentimes buy assistance for American citizens in that nation, alter the course of government laws or something similar in a way that benefits US interests.  In the case of Peru back in the 1990’s, that nation conspicuously changed its policies so that no USAmerican-based religious missionaries were banned or even jailed upon entering.  After a promise of aid to bail out the Peso, suddenly Mormons and other groups had access to the nation without harassment.
  • In the case of Africa, US Aid has helped stabilize certain governments and allow the economies to grow in ways that benefit both the locals and US interests.
  • Furthermore, as Africa increases in importance (industrialization and resource development), it the opening of doors and stabilization of governments has allowed foreign corporations to enter therein without fear of losing their sizable investment in whatever their unique industries are.

This all sound very Realpolitik, and it is.  Don´t lie to yourself, if you’re from Europe or China or Japan, your nation does this.  It’s in your nations interest to buy access and benefits for your citizens and corporations.  Few nations do this to the equal of the USA (China, Russia, the UK and France probably do it as well as the US, though), but remember two things (a) it’s not a zero-sum game.  What benefits the west in the case of Africa is helping pull a lot of people out of poverty and (b) even when it doesn’t, you only have the convenience of being pissy about the Machiavellian nature of foreign aid because that aid is contributing to the food on your table.

Now, don’t take my tone as advocacy for this.  I’m a secular, atheist, humanist. I hated the Bush era policy of restricting away from abortions in the 2000’s and the Clinton & Bush era policies of defending American missionary services (which has seen wonderful results in Uganda).  But, I’m also not so foolish as to deny their necessity and benefits in many cases.

Other posts on this topic:

Foreign aid as a percentage of your taxes Nov 28, 2011

Democrats and Republicans on Foreign Aid

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A useful article on the differences between the platforms on US foreign aid. Especially interesting for my field is the debate on where to park Obama’s signature Global Health Initiative. This year a decision was made to maintain its diplomacy focus by parking it in the State Department (versus transferring it to USAID, the USG’s development agency). The discussion is an interesting one because it explores the nature of US foreign aid, which is managed by multiple USG agencies.

Budget cuts by hatchet or scalpel?

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The excerpt below is from PBS’s Need to Know. Read the entire piece, Budget Cuts by Hatchet or Scalpel, written by Joshua Foust. Follow him on Google+.

This weekend’s “debt deal” in Congress, which raised the debt ceiling and agreed to some cuts in the future, contains a change in how the international affairs budget is calculated within the federal budget. In Section 102 of the bill, Function 150 budgets are reclassified as “security.” This means foreign assistance and development programs — USAID, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and lots of State Department programs — are now in the same budget category as the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and the National Nuclear Safety Administration.

It might seem like a minor thing, but this actually provides a sneaky way for the Congress to cut money from “national security” without actually touching sacred DOD programs. By cutting assistance agencies like USAID — a GOP goal for the last 18 months — Congress can cut from development assistance programs and say it is reducing national security spending. This change in language is damaging in that it furthers the militarization of civilian aid programs.

Respected defense analysts like Gordon Adams and Cindy Williams have argued forcefully that USAID is a part of the national security budget. And they are right to a degree: The argument that the U.S. has a compelling national security interest in developing poor countries, in responding to disasters and in alleviating famine is a perfectly reasonable one. Afghanistan and Pakistan are two of the biggest recipients of USAID money because the Obama administration believes USAID’s programs serve a vital function in America’s relationship to both countries.

But just because USAID can serve a national security function, it doesn’t automatically mean the international affairs budget should be militarized, or even considered part of the security budget. USAID, but also the MCC and other Function 150 programs (consisting of 12 departments, 25 agencies and nearly 60 government offices) perform lots of functions that have no direct bearing on national security. There is intrinsic value in effective programs like the Millennium Challenge Account Philippines that advance American national interests but do not play a security function. But, now they are all fall under a rubric of “security.”

Review: Wrike (web-based project management tool)

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The context of this review is at the end of this post. Other useful reviews I’ve found, some which echo a few points below, are here (reviewed against LiquidPlanner, 2010), here (reviewed against BaseCamp, 2007), here (comments from 2009), and here (2007).

My main complaint is the inconsistency problem in user experience: between users, within each user’s experience in using the same function, and then our team’s experience conflicts directly with what Wrike says its platform can do. What could this be from? The caching? The firewalls? We already all use the same version of Chrome.

Basic functionalities I expect from a project management platform:

1. Buffering between dependencies is unreliable – sometimes the buffer periods stick, but most of the time they don’t – and you don’t know it until you open those tasks again and see that your timeline has completely shifted. Wrike’s response as of Nov 2010: Wrike dependencies don’t support creating a time-delay between tasks.

2. Viewing your tasks in the timeline –

  • There’s no differentiation between types of tasks (eg meeting, action, appointment) or group levels (eg Output level vs subfolders like Province or Facility) in timeline – The headings have no color coding or font effects etc, making viewing it a bit of an eyeache.
  • The timeline view does not allow user-determined ordering of tasks and folders. I put the folder for Output 1 at the top for a reason, followed by the folders for Output 2, 3, etc. But Wrike’s timeline limits how these folders stack to the chronology of tasks within these folders.
  • The details box for each task doesn’t list its full folder path (eg in “Included in” box on details view)

3. Being able to view or export a list of tasks the user has sorted – This to me seems a critical function – You filter, search, sort all tasks by X person in X facility in X province within a specified date range. You want to see all tasks meeting these criteria across all Output folders. You get a list. But this list cannot be displayed online on the timeline nor can it be exported on CSV so I can view it on excel. Wrike’s response as of Dec 2010: Export function does not take search criteria into account.


4. Batch-edits such as selecting many tasks at once and deleting or moving them to another folder is not possible.

5. Recurring tasks – Changes to the original task does not cascade to the recurrences created from it! eg if you edit / delete a task, its recurrences do not reflect the edit – you must edit / delete all 12 or 300 individually. See #4 above – you cannot batch edit! So be careful using this “handy” function!

6. When editing tasks that are placed in two or more folders, the user is not prompted to replicate the adjustment in the other folders as well eg when the edited task’s timeline is adjusted it does not automatically update in the other folders, even though this is the same task in both folders. [Read more…] about Review: Wrike (web-based project management tool)

the good news on maternal mortality, and the politics of aid

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A good discussion in the Columbia Journalism Review on science versus advocacy, on the heels of The Lancet’s piece on declining Maternal Mortality Rates (MMR) worldwide (using new, more rigorous modeling on countries with estimates available):

On Wednesday, The New York Times gave its lead front-page slot to a study published in the medical journal The Lancet, where, “For the first time in decades, researchers are reporting a significant drop worldwide in the number women dying each year from pregnancy and childbirth, to about 342,900 in 2008 from 526,300 in 1980 … The study cited a number of reasons for the improvement: lower pregnancy rates in some countries; higher income, which improves nutrition and access to health care; more education for women; and the increasing availability of “skilled attendants” — people with some medical training — to help women give birth.”

…most articles took a pass on [The Lancet editor] Horton’s comments about pressure from advocacy groups. One exception was the Associated Press, which mentioned it right in the lede (although, curiously, a headline on an early version of the story that read “Politics of aid seen in clash over maternal deaths” was later changed to “Lancet: Sharp drop in maternal deaths worldwide”).

Unfortunately, the AP had nothing to add on the extent to which advocates are actually concerned about the political (read: financial support) ramifications of the statistics presented in The Lancet. What the article, by Maria Cheng, does mention is that “A separate report by a group headed by the United Nations reached a very different conclusion on maternal mortality, saying the figure remains steady at about 500,000 deaths a year.”

…Ultimately, Horton concluded, “given the dramatic difference” between the results of the Lancet study and those reported by the U.N. in 2008 (pdf), which found that little progress had been made toward reducing maternal mortality, “a process needs to be put in place urgently to discuss these figures, their implications, and the actions, global and in country, that should follow.”