Guest Blog by Tom Dichter, January 7, 2016
About a year ago the U.S. government’s foreign aid agency (USAID) completed a new mission statement based on polling some 1500 of its staff members.
“We partner to end extreme poverty and to promote resilient, democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity.”
I’ve been working in international development for fifty years and I’ve rarely seen as mindless a statement coming from any entity devoted to promoting development (Recall that USAID stands for the “United States Agency for International Development”).
Let’s start with the surprise – the word “development” does not appear in the mission statement of an agency supposedly devoted to it. Years ago, development was understood as the means to poverty reduction, and the hope was to reduce poverty, period, not just “extreme” poverty. But now USAID has obviously retreated to something that is relatively easy and measurable – ending extreme poverty rather than all poverty. One could argue that in this new goal USAID is simply being realistic – ending all poverty is of course not something we can expect any time soon. But my experience with this agency and with the development aid industry in general tells me that realism is not what we are seeing here. Instead it is a rather cynical reasoning that has something to do with keeping the agency in business and avoiding risk. Ending extreme poverty means stopping starvation, preventing infant deaths, providing clean water, raising the nutrition level of children, etc. In short dealing with the poorest of the poor. These things are relatively easy to do. They translate into providing food, inoculating children, bringing nutrition advice to mothers, promoting breast feeding, digging wells, and so on and they lend themselves to short term interventions and to measurement (caloric intake, infant mortality rates, etc.), and carry hardly any risk. All of this means USAID’s constituents in the public and in Congress can feel the money is well spent, and we can all feel virtuous.
But ending extreme poverty has little to do with long term economic development, and research has shown that while such efforts do reduce extreme poverty (defined as living on less than $1.25 per day) they do not move people much further than that (is getting to $1.50 or $1.75 per day really success?) Simply, they do not significantly change the conditions which explain how people came to be extremely poor in the first place.
Virtually all the intelligent discussion of foreign aid to developing nations has for years converged around a view that reducing poverty in a sustainable way depends on changes in the institutions of a society – institutions that embody and enforce the rule of law, ensure property rights, policies that bolster stability and broaden opportunities for economic participation. And these changes depend in their turn on changing the arrangements – both formal and informal – in the political economy, social structure, and culture of a society. But fostering, indeed even barely influencing, such changes is problematic. Fraught with complexity, always at risk of unintended consequences, and of one-step-forward-two-step-back oscillation, such work is a tough sell to a constituency that wants quick wins and measurable results.
Two generations ago the U.S. seems to have begun to understand that development was what our foreign aid should be involved with. Take a look at the U.S. government’s mission statement at the very beginning of our modern foreign aid apparatus – President Truman’s “Point Four Program” which was codified in the 1950 “Act for International Development.”
“It is declared to be the policy of the United States to aid the efforts of economically underdeveloped areas to develop their resources and improve their working and living conditions by encouraging the exchange of technical knowledge and skills and the flow of investment capital.”
While it was far from perfect, somewhat naïve and missed much, it headed in the right direction. It focused on capacity and capital; on skills, knowledge and investment – a formula that, while incomplete, still makes some sense (see China’s success in moving hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty). These are some of the key elements in the creation of enterprise and jobs, and through that economic growth.
Of course in the 1950 statement there was no mention of our security or prosperity; we did not then talk about combining aid to underdeveloped areas with the advancement of American security and prosperity. And we did not for a simple reason – they don’t fit well together. If the current USAID mission statement’s use of the word “partner” suggests we want to help others develop in tandem with them; on their terms (at least partly); then our prosperity, our security may not be what gets advanced. Almost by definition what should advance is their prosperity and their security. And if the Truman era mission statement was a bit naïve and harbored a too-unquestioned belief in ‘technical knowledge and skills’ at least it did not get caught in a blatant effort to have one’s cake and eat it too, which is what the current USAID mission statement tries to do.
Finally, where are those “resilient and democratic societies” that we want ‘to promote?’ I can name a few democracies, but few are “resilient,” and when I look at the 100 or so nations and territories receiving some sort of official U.S. aid, at best there are ten percent that come even close to being both resilient and democratic and on both counts there are reasons to be doubtful (Mexico, Panama, Indonesia, India, Georgia, Belarus, Botswana, Montenegro?). As for the other 90% (e.g., Haiti, South Africa, Rwanda, Kenya, Nigeria, the DRC, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Malawi, Philippines, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Guinea, Myanmar….the list is long…) well, let’s just say it’s a stretch to put any of them into either of the two categories. And anyway, if a country is a resilient democracy, it is then by all accounts well on the path to prosperity and does not really need much of our development aid.
So what then is the purpose of this participatory, time-consuming, and basically un-reflective effort to encase U.S. foreign aid in a new Vision and Mission? Do we chalk it up to mere political posturing – a hope that no one will pay much attention other than to its good intentions? Or is this an anodyne attempt to seem like we are doing something meaningful, and if so who is the audience? Congress? The concerned public? And if they read it carefully are they likely to believe it? Or is it just a way to kid ourselves?
Tom Dichter has 50 years of experience in international development. He has worked with the Peace Corps, Aga Khan Foundation, TechnoServe, UNDP, the World Bank and USAID. He is the author of Despite Good Intentions (2003) and co-editor of What’s Wrong with Microfinance (2007). This blog originally appeared at http://mindlessforeignaid.com/.