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Delays in the Foreign Aid Reform Process

As reported in Foreign Policy’s blog “State Department Review? Not Until April,” the preliminary report on the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) will not be released until the beginning of April at the earliest. In an update email sent by the director of the QDDR, the State Department Director of Policy Planning reported that the preliminary report is in its final stages. Meetings will be held with all agencies involved in U.S. development programs to seek their opinion on this initial report and the QDDR will continue to work alongside the NSA as they conduct the Presidential Study Directive-7 process. The email also announced that briefings will be conducted with Congressional leaders and staff before this report is released publicly.

Modeled after the Quadrennial Defense Review overseen by the Department of Defense, the QDDR is a major step toward foreign aid reform that the development community has been anxiously awaiting since the review was first announced last year. However, there are some concerns about the QDDR process and what it means for the roles of USAID and State in global development planning.  By grouping diplomacy and development concerns together in one review and relying on the policy planning operation of the State Department rather than USAID, the QDDR may only serve to continue the subjugation of USAID in planning long-term U.S. global development policy. The State-centric process of the QDDR simultaneously strips USAID of any policy planning legitimacy of its own and undermines its effectiveness. This process sends an important message that has implications for what we can expect from the QDDR’s content: it appears that the State Department fails to realize that foreign assistance must be separated from the political motivations of diplomacy in order to meet global development goals. Along this logic, Global Washington has recommended that USAID be made a Cabinet-level department autonomous from the Departments of State and Defense to better coordinate the response to global development needs.

The QDDR seeks to establish a set of short, medium, and long-term strategies for how the U.S. conducts its diplomacy and development programs. The State Department Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter and Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew are directing and overseeing the process of the QDDR. This process calls for a comprehensive review of the diplomatic and development challenges faced by the U.S. both now, and in the future, as well as the responses to these challenges in the past as a means to realize and disseminate long-term U.S. foreign policy objectives. With these objectives in place, the QDDR will offer direction on how the State Department and USAID should organize the tools and resources necessary to meet the challenges of the 21^st century.

As a result of the delay in the QDDR process, the entire course of foreign aid reform has been slowed down. The Presidential Study Directive to review the U.S. global development strategy (PSD-7) is also underway and will most likely defer release until the QDDR is finalized and released. The Senate bill S. 1524– the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act of 2009- sponsored by Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar, is also reported to be delaying Senate consideration until more detailed information on the findings of the QDDR is released.

The Presidential Study Directive has the potential to elevate USAID and global development concerns to a higher level, as it is an initiative of the White House, a neutral third party in planning the direction of U.S. global development policy. It follows a whole-of-government approach to reviewing and reforming the U.S. foreign assistance strategy. The PSD will evaluate the actions of the more than two-dozen departments and agencies contributing to U.S. foreign assistance programming in an effort to develop a national global development strategy to increase coordination and transparency, which is one of the principle recommendations of Global Washington in order to make U.S. foreign assistance policy more effective.

But before the PSD-7 can be completed and released, the State Department must first finish the QDDR. Thus, hopefully the initial report of the QDDR will be released during the first week of April as promised, and a clear and effective global development strategy will be one step closer to fruition.

Policy News Roundup – Will they reform foreign aid before it implodes?

Foreign Aid Reform: In a recent Huffington Post article, Carol Peasley writes about the “what next” of foreign aid reform, beyond giving development a stronger voice in the larger policy discussions.  She asks: how can we make aid more effective through greater local ownership- what would that look like, in terms of process and funding?  She also says that much of the discussion about USAID reform has become “contractor bashing,” which is not constructive.

House Foreign Relations Committee Hearing, Combating Climate Change in Africa, next Thursday, April 15^th.  See the live webcast on the House website.

The collapse of aid? Owen Barder, author of the insightful and sometimes controversial blog Owen Abroad, writes about the “coming collapse of the development system.”   In sum, he writes that aid has become more and more complex, and based on the literature, complex systems are bound to fail when they are too rigid to change.

Global Jam: USAID held its first ever “jam” called Global Pulse last week, and the number of participants from around the world was impressive – 11,000 “jammers” from 150 countries, according to an article on the virtual event by Devex.

Blogger Chris Blattman remarks on the fact that there is a “market for everything,” even in pretty harsh conditions.  Like manicures in a Haitian tent camp.   See the feature presentation on PBS.

The Bad Old Days Were Better, in Zimbabwe: Kristof writes in the NY Times about how badly President Mugabe has destroyed Zimbabwe: people are nostalgic for the good old days of living under the rule of a nasty, oppressive regime run by a tiny white elite.

How to Find Foreign Aid Data

No matter what your specific area of work, if you’re in the global development field, at some point you will probably need to find data on foreign aid.  Maybe you work for a small NGO considering a new venture, in say, Cambodia, and you want to know what other similar types of projects are happening there.  Maybe you are looking for funding for a project in Namibia, and you want to know which donors currently fund the most work there.  Or maybe you are writing an article about aid effectiveness and you want to see which country attracts the majority of U.S. foreign aid, compared with other large donors.

Here is a quick breakdown of the data sources out there, what kinds of information they have, and how to use them.  You can find all of these sources and more listed on our website, under the “Resources” tab, and “Policy” under “Issue Areas.”

The OECD DAC Statistics

The OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) collects aid data from OECD members and non-members, and is considered the most reliable source of aid data.  Other databases rely on OECD data.  The DAC includes grants and concessional loans, but does not include payments made to individuals, military aid, or loans that must be repaid within one year.  For more general information about DAC statistics see this factsheet.

How does it work?  I recommend using the QWIDS interface, or Query Wizard for International Development Statistics.  When you open the link to this interface, you can choose donors, recipients, types of aid flows, sectors, and time period (2008 is the most recent year available).  You can get really specific and only look at disbursements of grants for technical cooperation projects in a certain sector, like teacher-training.  Once you hit “display the data” you’ll see a chart with some of the data choices you selected- the rest will be visible by toggling the options at the top of the chart.  You can also change the layout of the chart.  You can see a breakdown of aid by project, by clicking on the dollar amount in the results.  This gives the name of the agency funding the project, along with a short description of the project which usually gives at least an idea of what sector the project is in.

AidData

AidData is a new source for development finance information.  It is based mainly on OECD data, but it includes more detail and cross-references the data with information from other sources.  It is a more graphical and somewhat more user-friendly interface.  According to their website, AidData plans to include aid flows from non-governmental sources, such as NGOs, in the near future.  So far there is no compilation of such data anywhere, so this would be useful.

The nice thing about AidData is the way the results are presented- it is much more intuitive and very easy to find whatever specific information is available.  AidData still runs into the same problem as the OECD though, a lot of information just isn’t available, probably because it’s not reported.

Foreign Assistance Congressional Budget Justification (FY 2011)

What if you need more current data for U.S. foreign assistance to a particular country?  What if you want to compare congressional appropriations with actual disbursements?  And what if you are interested in military aid, and other types of aid not considered by the OECD?  Then you might turn to the Congressional Budget Justification, or the CBJ as it is called.  There is no database, and no fancy online query to fill out, just lots of paper to wade through.  However, the State Department puts the most useful tables on foreign assistance together in one document, the Foreign Assistance tables, found here.  For comparison of U.S. assistance to recipient countries, tables 2a through 4 are the most useful.  Before you dive right into the material, you should at least look at the acronyms on page vii, which lists all of the different accounts used by Congress.  These accounts are known by their acronyms, like ‘DA’ for development assistance and ‘ESF’ for economic support fund.  To make matters more confusing, these accounts are not really used by the State Department and USAID except to request money from Congress- some programs use funding from multiple accounts, if necessary.  There is a different chart for each year, starting with actual funds committed in 2009, estimated commitments in 2010, and the Presidential request for the international affairs budget in FY 2011.  There are also special charts that track funding in areas of special interest to Congress, such as Basic Education and Microenterprise.

If you are looking for more detailed information than can be found in these handy charts, you may want to wade through Volume II of the Foreign Operations CBJ, where you will find lots of detailed information about various U.S. foreign assistance programs.

I wish you good luck on your quest for foreign aid data.  If you know of any other good sources, or if you have any questions, please let me know in the comments.