“The first annual Global Washington conference (a “Blueprint for Action”) brought together 300 individuals representing organizations from across Washington State that are focused on global development issues… The Global Washington event showcased the vibrancy, energy and innovation taking place across the State on addressing global development.”

Global Development From The “Other Washington”
Huffington Post |  Posted by Akhtar Badshah | December 11, 2009

“When the U.S. State Department came to Seattle on Dec. 8 for advice on how to better serve foreign countries, local nonprofits and corporations seized the opportunity to send some of their leading representatives to the meeting…The group discussed how to use public-private partnerships effectively. The session was arranged by Global Washington, an association of organizations with operations overseas.”

Some Of Seattle’s Heavy Hitters Turn Out For State Dept. Session
Puget Sound Business Journal | Posted by Clay Holtzman | December 11, 2009

MFAN, the modernizing foreign assistance network, is circulating a petition for a global development strategy to give development a strong voice in foreign policy decisions.  They already have collected over 30,000 signatures- let’s help them reach their goal of 50,000 signatures by December 22nd!

Right now, President Obama and his senior White House advisors are preparing recommendations that will shape the future of U.S. efforts to alleviate poverty, fight disease, and create economic opportunity for the world’s poorest people. Your voice needs to be heard in this debate! Sign the first-ever development community petition asking the White House to send a strong signal about America’s commitment to development.

Sign the petition here.

The panel on Building Partnerships for Development brought together members from the public, private, and non-profit sectors. The panelists included President Elson Floyd of Washington State University, President Mark Emmert of the University of Washington, Mike Veitenhans of World Vision, Kris Balderston of the U.S. State Department, John Beale of VillageReach, and Gary Kotzen from Costco. The panel discussed both the success and challenges of building development partnerships.

One success mentioned was Costco’s ability to develop and bring the limited resource commodities of developing economies to market at Costco. For instance, the majority of the world’s supply of vanilla comes from Madagascar and Costco is able to mobilize local vanilla farmers to sell directly through Costco without middlemen. Through the shear leverage of Costco’s size, the co-op is able to purchase the vanilla at a higher price from the farmers and sell directly to its customers at a lower price. Gary Kotzen made the case for private sector involvement in development by explaining that Costco can only grow its business by helping to grow the communities and local businesses that create these limited resource commodities.

John Beale, of the non-profit VillageReach, offered an effective strategy to ensure continuing funding for non-profit aid work despite the recent 40% decrease in public donor-ship. He explained, by partnering with businesses, non-profits can continue to do their work when funding dries up.

Panelists also had to address the hard-hitting question, “If all of your strategies are working, then why are people still hungry? Where are the breakdowns?” President Emmert explained that many of the development challenges we face are a problem of scale. He explained, “people get passionate about the solutions and not the problems. People are committed to their one solution but there needs to be honesty about scale. We need to determine, what is scalable and what is not?”

One member of the audience asked with frustration, “Why are we not empowering people in their own countries to build the products they need, like mosquito nets and vaccine kits?” Mike Veitenhans of World Vision explained that in many situations, the resources necessary for manufacturing these products aren’t always readily available in country. While John Beale of VillageReach commented that the real issue is that due to geographical location remote communities do not have the capabilities to manufacture these products at prices that the world can afford.

In closing, the panelists offered hopes for what they wanted to see in the next three years. Among these hopes were changing public sector culture to engage more external participants in development, building capacity in communities through local ownership, and making financing readily available for businesses in developing countries.

Writing by Nina Carduner
Photography by Nancy LeVine

Keynote speaker Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley discusses the importance of building partnerships between the public and private sectors in effort to take on the wide-ranging scope of the world’s challenges. She notes that in the 1960s, 70% of the aid money from the U.S. to foreign countries was official government development funding. Today, 80% of aid money from the U.S. to foreign countries comes from private assistance through businesses, philanthropists, and non-profits. This increase in private sector funding highlights the necessity of government partnership with the private sector. Bagley says, “partnerships are at the heart of ‘smart power’ and go beyond the effectiveness of soft and hard power to achieve foreign policy goals.” Advances in technology have broken geographic and economic barriers and the global community is connected now more than ever before.

New world players are emerging and governments or traditional political actors that rely on doing ‘business as usual’ will diminish their role in the world unless they recognize that all the issues are interconnected and so too are the answers. Bagley emphasizes, “no government or leader can act alone to address the world’s needs.” Cross-sector global partnerships are critical for working towards women’s empowerment, anti-humantrafficing initiatives, promoting energy security with clean energy, and “creating real change with how the [U.S.] government engages with other governments,” according to Bagley. One key partnership involves engaging diaspora communities with opportunities to contribute to the political, social, and economic growth of their respective homelands. Bagley underscores when governments, particularly the U.S. government, partner with key stakeholders they become conveners, catalysts, and collaborators for real change in the communities and countries they serve.

Writing by Nina Carduner
Photography by Nancy LeVine

A panel discussing Washington’s Contributions to the National and International Agenda on Women and Poverty describe the key strategies that work in addressing poverty and helping women across the world. The panelists included Renee Giovarelli of the Rural Development Institute that works to promote land-rights for the poor and women, Margaret Willson from the Bahia Street school in Brazil, Rick Beckett from Global Partnerships, and Suzanne Sinegal McGill from Rewanada Girls Initiative. Adaptability, partnership, and collaboration were listed among the best key strategies highlighted by the panelists, including knowing how to admit to failures and learning how to improve from there.

Writing by Nina Carduner
Photography by Nancy LeVine

Nicholas Kristof, renown New York Times columnist, opens the first annual Global Washington Conference: Blueprint for Action today at the Microsoft campus in Renton, WA. He recounts the story of living in a bugged apartment in China reserved for NY Times journalists only to realize the listening device was actually the apartment’s doorbell. This experience highlights his message that, “whenever you think you know what’s going on in a foreign culture, it’s time to back down and gain some humility.”  There is growing concern over the effectiveness of foreign aid thanks to fears of corruption and bureaucracy around the world. Kristof admits, “helping people is harder than it looks, but we’re getting better at figuring out what aid is most cost effective” thanks to the growing involvement of the business community who emphasize metrics and cost analysis. “Seattle has been at the heart of that.”

Kristof chiefly promotes investing in women by using business sense to improve aid efficacy. He contends there is good evidence that development efforts focusing on education and women “really do bring societies back from the brink.” Advocates overemphasize the tragedy and injustice that poor women suffer around the world and instead should be advocating more for the opportunity that women present.  He says, “emphasizing the opportunity gets the most traction. For most poor countries, the greatest unexploited economic investment is the female population.” Many solutions, focusing on women, can be cost-effective and simple to implement. One area with the best record is health. The two political camps in HIV prevention endlessly debate over the use of condoms or abstinence as a solution. Kristof highlights how in S. Africa, one simple intervention with success in mitigating HIV transmission avoided both of these solutions. The intervention involved teaching teenage girls to avoid relationships with middle-aged men, known as “sugar daddies,” who have a high rate of HIV. This successful intervention involved educators going from classroom to classroom and cost less than $1 per person. Kristof also hails deworming as another low-cost solution to promoting school attendance and education for poor children, especially girls. Deworming a child costs less than 50 cents a year.

Micro-lending is a huge trend in development today. However, according to Kristof, its true effectiveness lies in enabling economically disenfranchised populations to save through micro-savings. Kristof explains, “People don’t need an income, they need a cushion.” Many people in developing countries do not have access to banks or safe places to secure their finances due to weather and theft. In some places with access banks, such as parts of West Africa, people face paying 80% a year to save their money. It is no secret that micro-lending has enabled women to enhance their societal statuses in developing countries, but part of this equation is education.

Educating women and empowering them helps to end the cycle of poverty in developing countries and reduces world conflict.  One example Kristof gives is the difference between Bangladesh and Pakistan. When Bangladesh split from Pakistan in 1971, it focused primarily on education, especially for women. This education initiative created a basis for what is now Bangladesh’s bustling garment industry which provided women with jobs and status in their communities. Enhancing education also helped to facilitate micro-lending institutions like the famed Grameen bank, which has also been instrumental in elevating the status of women. Meanwhile, Pakistan contrasts with a large population of uneducated illiterate girls and continues to experience security issues with extremists and terrorists along with extreme poverty. The proof is in the pudding as Kristof describes that educated women will invest in the education of their children whereas men will spend the larger portion of their earnings in alcohol, tobacco, and prostitution. Giving women more earning power with education, micro-lending, status, legal rights will lead to children being the beneficiaries of these earnings. With this in mind, it is no wonder that the metric for stability used by the U.S. in an Afghani district is the proportion of girls who are educated within the district.

Writing by Nina Carduner
Photography by Nancy LeVine

“Business, government, education and non-profit representatives from across the State of Washington gathered for speeches and panel discussions about ways to leverage resources, increase visibility, share best practices and advocate for global engagement and foreign policy which will, in turn, highlight Washington’s strength in a global economy… Among the most pressing global needs…are building partnerships for clean energy and food and water security; nuclear non-proliferation; and insuring democracy for women and minorities endangered by such practices as human trafficking, as well as health concerns such as HIV/AIDS and malaria.”

Global Washington Holds First Annual ‘Blueprint For Action’ Conference At Microsoft
Redmond Reporter | Posted by Mary Decker | December 7, 2009

“About 300 representatives from the public, private, non-profit and education sectors gathered at Microsoft on Monday to discuss global development. At the heart of the agenda was the vital role of empowering women and girls to combat poverty… A total of 114 Washington organizations are working on economic development, development and alleviation of poverty, 85 Evergreen State organizations conduct programs that improve global healths, and 85 state organizations contribute to climate, environmental and agricultural activities.”

World aid experts told: Think Local
Seattle Post-Intelligence | Posted by Joel Connelly | December 7, 2009

Transparency International released its annual Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) last week.  Not surprisingly, some of the biggest recipients of U.S. foreign aid fared poorly in the corruption rankings- countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and Pakistan.  Daniel Kaufmann writes in the Brookings Institute’s blog  that it would be misguided to simply pull the plug on aid channeled to corrupt countries, but we need to examine the evidence and ask some hard questions.  To allow the status quo to continue would be just as negligent as discontinuing aid entirely.  Kaufmann suggests five important questions to ask of U.S. foreign aid, which I summarize here:

1. Has there been any improvement in corruption in countries where the U.S. and other donors provide aid?
2. What have we learned about aid from the experience of large aid flows to not-very-corrupt countries?
3. Is aid making a difference one way or another- is it making corruption better, worse, or having no effect?
4. How can we work around corrupt governments- is there a way to work in the country without perpetuating the problem?
5. How has U.S. foreign aid been directly tainted by corruption?

One possible way to reduce corruption, over time, is to shine the light on corrupt practices through transparency.  The Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) is an example of an international initiative to do just that.  EITI sets a global standard for transparency in the extractive industries.  Countries that sign on to this initiative agree to publish the amount of funds received from their extractive industries (mining, oil, etc), and require companies to publish what they pay for these extractive industries.  Then these reports are compared, and any discrepancies are brought to light. 

There are currently 28 EITI candidate countries, which means that they are in the process of reporting on their extractive industries but they haven’t had their reports validated yet.  Two countries have completed the validation process and are now compliant countries, Azerbaijan and Liberia.  It may be a coincidence, but these two countries have improved their standing on the Corruption Perceptions Index since becoming EITI compliant.  EITI countries are mostly resource-rich developing countries that have had problems with the so-called resource curse, but Norway is also a candidate country, and EITI is open to any resource-rich country.  In fact, many observers are calling for countries such as the United States and Russia to become EITI compliant.

Where does the United States stand on the EITI?  It is officially listed as a supporting country, which means that it endorses the initiative.  The U.S. also provides funds to EITI, and it just contributed $6 million to the EITI trust fund facility, which is managed by the World Bank.  In September, Senator Dick Lugar introduced the Energy Security Through Transparency Act, S. 1700 , which would: require companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges to disclose their extractive payments to foreign governments; encourage the President to work multilaterally with other countries to promote similar disclosure; express the sense of Congress that the United States should become an “implementing country” of EITI; and commit the Department of the Interior to disclose extractive payments received for resources derived from federal lands.

And while we’re talking about transparency, U.S. foreign aid could stand to have some light shed on it too.  It could commit to being more transparent about aid through the International Aid Transparency Initiative , which came out of the Accra High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in September 2008.  So far most developed countries are signatories, but the United States is absent from that list.