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