Development Assistance
On the eve of an ever more likely government shutdown, Raj Shah reminds us of the millions of people around the world who count on the support and assistance of the US government.
(more…)
Earlier today, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) released preliminary data for donor spending in 2010. ONE’s analysis of the new data (which focuses on sub-Saharan Africa and excludes bilateral debt relief) reveals that donors increased development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa by 12 percent in 2010, a sizable boost considering that global development assistance increased by only 7 percent.
All G8 members (excluding Russia, which does not report to the DAC) increased their spending in 2010, with large increases coming from France, Japan and the UK and smaller boosts from Canada and Italy.
Historic increases in development assistance have supported incredible progress in the world’s poorest countries over the past decade (a message that Bill and Melinda Gates are sharing across European capitals this week as part of ONE’s Living Proof Campaign). However, early indications suggest that increases from most donors will not be enough to meet the targets they set in 2005 to achieve by 2010.
(more…)
Here’s a question that 63 percent of Americans can’t answer: How much of our government spending goes toward foreign aid? The answer: less than 1 percent.
According to a recent poll, Americans believe that the government spends more on defense and foreign aid than it does on Medicare and Social Security. In fact, Americans think that we spend an average of 27 percent on foreign aid — that’s more than what we spend on our military budget. And don’t even talk to me about GDP. Our GDP ranks No. 1, yet in 2009, we ranked in seventh place for aid funding.
It angers me that Congress is targeting foreign aid spending (of all things) for major cuts this year. That 1 percent funds important programs that save lives and advocate peace, stability and security beyond our borders. Even though it makes up a tiny percentage of our budget, we’ve been able to maximize that funding and put it toward effective programs like USAID, PEPFAR and the Global Fund that are helping to make a real difference in fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease.
Yet there have been proposals to bring down the bill that funds US diplomacy and assistance to poor countries by 17 percent from FY2010 amounts, including a 30 percent cut to development assistance from last year’s amount, a $450 million cut to the Global Fund and a 41 percent cut to humanitarian aid for disaster relief.
Let me translate these figures into human lives for you. If the Global Fund loses its funding, up to 58,286 HIV-positive pregnant women will not receive treatments to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. About 6 million treatments for malaria will not be administered. 372,000 testing and treatments for tuberculosis will be halted. And 414,000 people living with HIV/AIDS will not be provided the antiretroviral medication they need to survive. As you can see, this is truly a matter of life and death.
But here’s the thing — you can do something about this right this very moment. Tell your senator to SAY NO to the budget cuts. We know Congress faces tough choices on the budget, but these cuts fall hardest on the people who can least afford them. Join more than 95,000 ONE members and sign our petition.
The UN Foundation, in partnership with the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) and the Standard Bank recently hosted a panel on the role of innovative financing and the global health funding gap.
Innovative financing plays a critical role in promoting efficiencies in investments and addressing funding gaps for foreign assistance, which is more important than ever given the challenging fiscal climate. Keynote speaker Amie Batson, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, said “innovative finance, alongside advances in research, clinical practice and social marketing, is crucial in our efforts to reach ambitious global health goals in a resource-constrained environment.”
At the event, the UN Foundation unveiled the Pledge Guarantee for Health (PGH), a new financial tool to help expedite the disbursement of foreign assistance while making global health supplies more affordable for developing countries. PGH provides short-term loans to developing country recipients on the basis of pending aid commitments, which in turn helps countries avoid high costs that can arise while they are waiting for funding to replenish supplies of life-saving medications. Through the first PGH-facilitated deal, more than 800,000 anti-malaria bed nets were delivered and distributed in Zambia three months ahead of schedule and before the deadly rainy season. Throughout the year, we look forward to tracking the progress of this new financing mechanism and the life-saving impact it will have.
After the event, I had the opportunity to speak with Joy Phumaphi, executive secretary of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, about global health challenges and existing financing mechanisms to address these problems such as the Global Fund and GAVI. Joy shared with me her support for the Global Fund and GAVI and encouraged ONE members to continue fighting on behalf of the world’s poor.
Here’s what she said:
“The Global Fund is the biggest single donor of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in the developing world. And it is not just the biggest funder but it is also a development tool that has created ownership of the fight against malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS. That mechanism has effectively brought together stakeholders in a way that no other mechanism has ever been able to do in global development. This is a huge contribution to development… the contribution the Global Fund has made to global health is comparable to none…. Investments are more critical now than ever because it is not only a question of losing potential gains in the future but it is a question of losing the investments that we’ve made and we can’t afford to do that.”
Photo courtesy of Jake Brewer via Flickr
Over the past 10 days, we have been absorbing and reacting to developments around not just one, but two budgets that significantly effect global poverty reduction programs. After looking at both, however, you might conclude that they were headed in opposite directions, having far-reaching, but far different impacts on the lives of the world’s poor. And you would be correct.
Last week, the House debated an appropriations measure that would finalize US spending for FY2011 -– that’s this year, nearly half of which has gone by. As approved, the House bill cuts the International Affairs budget by 19 percent from FY2010 amounts with serious consequences for poverty programs. Resources for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are slashed by $450 million and global development assistance is cut 30 percent below last year’s amount, placing the administration’s Feed the Future Initiative in great jeopardy.
Humanitarian aid supporting victims of emergencies and disasters around the world shrink by over 41 percent with food assistance falling to levels of a decade ago. For the Bush Administration’s signature program, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the $790 million appropriation is 29 percent below last year and the smallest budget the MCC has ever received.
(more…)
In the development community, we tend to message in the abstract: Africa. Poverty. Transparency. Mortality. Growth. These words make for snappy elevator pitches and clever tweets, but they can also numb us to the reality and difficulty of what we do, and we can too easily lose sight of the unique people and programs for whom development efforts are intended.
Sister Suzan with Erin Hohlfelder
I feel so lucky to travel around sub-Saharan Africa with ONE, because I get to come face-to-face with the people who are recipients, distributors and designers of development programs. I flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, last Tuesday with a few of my colleagues, and my time here so far has yet again allowed me to meet up with some really impressive people who have devoted parts (or all) of their lives to making their country a more healthy, stable and just place.
Take Sister Suzan, the head of the antenatal clinic at Chris Hani Baragwanath “Bara” Hospital on the outskirts of the Soweto slum. She’s worked at Bara for 35 years — through apartheid, through the emergence of the HIV pandemic, through the previous government’s refusal to allow antiretroviral treatment for AIDS, and (most notably of late) through major progress.
When AIDS first hit Soweto, mothers who were pregnant couldn’t get drugs to prevent the spread of HIV to their babies or to protect themselves. In the early 2000s, a single dose of treatment (nevirapine) was available for the babies, but mothers struggled to access treatment early enough to stay healthy, and as many as 50 percent of babies were still born HIV-positive. Now, all mothers who come to Bara can receive treatment and counseling services from Sister Suzan and her staff, and rates of mother-to-child transmission of HIV have been reduced to less than 5 percent across Soweto.
Grassroot Soccer staff members
Or, take the staff of Grassroot Soccer (GRS), a motley and energetic crew of both South Africans and Americans on year-long internships. GRS taps into the energy of thousands of children ages 10 to 19 who aspire to be star athletes and teaches them the life skills they’ll need to prevent the spread of HIV and to feel empowered along the way. When we weren’t kicking around soccer balls on the field, we heard impressive testimonies from the staff members — many of who became emotional when describing their commitment to the work they did on a daily basis, often having seen the devastating impact of HIV in their communities and families firsthand.
There are not enough blog posts to profile all of the Sister Suzans here. In less than a week, we’ve met up with health experts, brave AIDS activists, innovative thinkers — and they all have a lot of great advice for ONE on how we can be smarter advocates. Each of these people has one other thing in common — they are working on development projects that have benefited from US foreign assistance.
In fact, the message we’ve heard over and over is that US funding for programs like PEPFAR and the Global Fund helped to lay the groundwork for massive scale up of health efforts and a more sustainable path for the South African government to adopt a majority of the responsibility for health services themselves (another ONE colleague in Jo’burg, Josh Lozman, will have more on that in a later blog post).
So, it was with great anxiety that we received news this week that the House Appropriators had submitted massive cuts to the international affairs budget.
Like the catchy words used by the development community, budget cuts are often abstractions that disguise the true negative impact they make. It’s hard to conceptualize what less money means when it’s just a series of numbers (can you really tell the difference between $200 million and $190 million on paper?).
But this week has reminded me that when we think budget cuts, we should think about what it means for Sister Suzan’s ability to ensure that all mothers can prevent their babies from being born with HIV. We should think about what it means for the jobs of South Africans and Americans alike, working at GRS to ensure that the next generation of kids can have lower rates of HIV and higher rates of education and skills. We should think about what it means for the civil society groups and doctors who are doing selfless work every day to make sure people don’t have to suffer from diseases that aren’t even a nuisance in the western world. Because Americans have been generous and bold with our foreign aid investments, and our partners in the developing world can’t afford for us to hide behind the abstractions in this critical moment.
On Wednesday in Paris, a group of international donors agreed to a new standard for publishing their aid flows, in a common language and format, to make the information easier to access and compare. Although this may not seem particularly exciting at the outset, it is a huge victory in terms of making aid to developing countries more effective and more accountable.
The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)—which is a coalition of donor countries and multilateral organizations, recipient countries, and civil society organizations—aims to improve and increase transparent reporting on aid flows and activities. At present, individual donors largely decide themselves what and how much information they want to make public regarding money they spend on international development. What they do publish isn’t always easily comparable to what other donors make available, and that makes it very difficult to track aid flows at the international level, or even within specific recipient countries. With IATI’s help, and with the new standard developed by their steering committee on Wednesday, more and more donors will be encouraged to publish their information in a common format on their registry.
At ONE’s sister organization, Publish What You Fund, Director Karin Christiansen has been working with IATI to push for greater transparency among donors in the international system. Following the developments, she noted:
(more…)
