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Nicholas Kristof Opens Global Washington Conference

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

Transparency and Corruption: like Garlic and Vampires

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.

We Need You to Act Now for a Robust FY11 International Affairs Budget

Nearly 140 members of Congress have signed on to the FY11 Congressional Letter to the President supporting a robust International Affairs budget. From Washington State, Senator Patty Murray, as well as Representatives Adam Smith, David Reichert, Richard Larsen, and Jim McDermott have signed on. The U.S. Global Leadership Coalition needs your help to get more members of the Washington State delegation signed on to this important letter! The deadline is November 25th– only two days away.

Click here to urge your members of Congress to sign the letter.

UPDATE:  Thank you for taking action- the USGLC reports that a record number of legislators have signed on to this letter demanding a robust FY 11 international affairs budget.  Representatives Jay Inslee and Brian Baird of Washington State added their names to the letter after this post was published.  For a full list of the signatories to the letter, see the FY 11 Congressional Letter to the President Update Center on the USGLC website.