reduce poverty, hunger, or disease, even though it was usu- with the U.S. State Department providing overall policy
ally evaluated according to whether it did so.3 The differ- guidance. This structure and allocation of responsibilities
ent categories of aid are not, of course, mutually exclusive. remained largely intact through the end of the 1980s.
There are areas of overlap. The problem arises when the
With the end of the Cold War came a new wave of assisgoals of assistance are not clearly stated and thus it’s very tance programs for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
hard to tell whether those goals have been met.
Union, implemented largely by USAID but “coordinated” by
By and large, U.S. assistance has been highly effective— the Department of State, which also provided resources to
particularly where there are specific development objectives. other departments and agencies. Once begun, this extension
Korea and Taiwan, formerly recipients of large amounts of development-related work to a proliferation of agencies
of foreign aid, are now economic powerhouses and also c ontinued through the current administration. Under the adpartners in global security. India has gone from chronic food ministration of George W. Bush, development assistance has
deficits to food exports and sustained economic growth. increasingly been cast in a security mold, what is sometimes
Smallpox has been eradicated. Safe water and sanitation referred to as the “securitization” of foreign aid.5
What does the rise of securitization mean for development
have been provided to millions. The challenge is to extend
these achievements to the remaining “bottom billion” living programs? The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has gone
from managing 6 percent of U.S. development assistance in
in extreme poverty in the most effective way possible.
Despite all the successes, the current structure of
U.S. foreign aid makes it more difficult to achieve
long-term development goals. As Brookings InstiWho Gets Foreign Aid?
tution scholar Lael Brainard points out, there are
The largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid tend to be those
roughly 50 “foreign assistance objectives” and 20
where U.S. political interests are centered. Elevating national
U.S. departments or agencies that provide aid (with
security to the top of the priority list skews foreign aid in the
many more fiefdoms within those organizations), redirection of immediate crisis situations or to governments that
sulting in an organizational chart of stunning comsupport U.S. security priorities. Table 1 shows the top ten U.S.
plexity.4 Such fracturing makes it almost impossible
aid recipients in Fiscal Year (FY) 2007, along with their per capto address the many development challenges in a
ita income and U.S. aid per capita. One could certainly argue
sustained, integrated way.
that Afghanistan, a desperately poor country, merits generous
In order to determine what the actual goals of
development assistance. But, in spite of its poverty, Afghanistan
U.S. development assistance should be, and assess
was “off the radar screen” for foreign assistance until it became a
objectively whether they are being met, it would be
security interest in 2001. As shown in the chart, Iraq reconstruchelpful to tie funding to specific international tartion is a high priority. Sudan makes the top ten primarily by
gets such as the indicators in the Millennium Devirtue of the massive humanitarian program underway there,
velopment Goals, for example, reducing mortality
but also because it happens to sit atop large oil reserves. But the
of under-five-year-olds by two-thirds. Aid given for
inclusion in the top ten aid recipients of relatively high-income
security or political reasons must have its own sepacountries chiefly reflects political (Jordan, Egypt) or counter-narrate measures of effectiveness. We simply must be
cotics (Colombia) interests. Development and poverty reduction
clear about where each type of aid is being used and
are not the main objectives.
specify valid ways to measure whether each is effective. The confounding of development and political
Table 1: Top Ten U.S. Aid Recipients, FY 2007
goals, as in the case of Pakistan, undercuts our ability to achieve either.
Total FY’07
Aid Allocations GNP per capita
A Time Line of Foreign Aid
As mentioned earlier, U.S. foreign aid in its current form dates back to the Foreign Assistance Act
of 1961. The Kennedy Administration laid out national security and development objectives in this
act and set up the U.S. Agency for International
Development (USAID) as the principal executor of
foreign aid. USAID was to bring together disparate
programs from various agencies and departments,
4 Briefing Paper, July 2008
Iraq
Afghanistan
Sudan
Ethiopia
Colombia
Egypt
Pakistan
Jordan
Tanzania
Zambia
Aid Allocation9 per capita ($)
($ thousand)
1,926,800
1,538,277
497,125
470,535
469,85810
455,000
411,362
255,300
245,597
234,265
68.80
49.60
13.40
6.45
10.21
6.00
2.60
42.55
6.29
19.50
1,000
190
2,160
1,190
7,620
4,690
2,500
6,210
740
1,000