Briefing Papers Number 4, July 2008 | Page 4

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