Thoughts
Despite what some have argued in recent years, foreign assistance can effectively facilitate development. Over the past half century the development community has had numerous victories: the Green Revolution, the eradication of smallpox, and economic growth in aid-recipient countries such as Botswana and Mozambique.
Still, arguments by some scholars that foreign assistance is simply not worthwhile resonate for a reason: there substantial room for improvement. While insufficient funding is an obstacle to development, perhaps an even more pressing challenge is aid effectiveness. The United States is arguably stingy on a per capita basis, but in terms of total aid given, it is still the most important player in the foreign assistance field. Or at least it should be. The United States aid apparatus suffers from organizational dysfunction and a proliferation of objectives; there are over fifty separate organizations and offices with in the US government pursuing fifty distinct foreign assistance goals. For this reason, the United States punches far below its weight in the international arena while organizations with much smaller budgets, such as the British Department for International Development, play disproportionately influential roles in setting the development agenda. Naturally this is bad news for the United States, but it is even worse for development. Developing countries already have to deal with a dizzying array of bilateral and multilateral organizations when receiving aid; they certainly should not have to deal with a multitude of agencies from the same country. How can we demand that these countries to be responsible for their own development when all of their resources are devoted to managing our inefficiency? I would therefore posit that one of the greatest challenges facing the development community in the new century is learning to give aid strategically. In this case I do not mean “strategically†according to national interests (although for the US there is much room for improvement in that area as well), but rather according to sound development theory and based on successful past experiences. The body of research on aid effectiveness is already substantial and is still growing. The challenge now is the follow-through. Smarter aid will pay dividends in the developing world, but will require honest self-evaluation on the part of the development community. |
