Development Works The Complete Set | Page 17

ESSAY  3 Richard Lord Leadership and Teamwork: The U.S. Role in Development U.S. development partnerships complement the efforts of people working toward a better life, such as this Nepali woman on one of her daily trips to bring home clean water. SNAPSHOT • Strengthening global partnerships for development can help the United States make a deeper impact on hunger and extreme poverty around the world. These issues require collective action; no one country has enough power or resources to solve the problem. • Multilateral cooperation enables the global community to pool resources, share knowledge of what is working well, and identify and fill funding gaps in the most promising programs. In international development, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. • U.S. leadership is essential to global action on food security— it persuades others to act. A 2009 U.S. proposal to invest significantly more resources in agriculture won support from donors in the “Group of 8” (G-8) developed nations, who committed to providing $22 billion to improve agricultural productivity over three years. In contrast, when the United States reduced its sup