Transforming Foreign Aid for the 21st Century: New Recommendations from the Brookings-CSIS Task Force

Transcript

LAEL BRAINARD: With hard-power assets stretched thin and facing these 21st century threats — global poverty, pandemics, terrorism — America has reached a point where it absolutely must deploy its soft power more effectively, but to do so will require an overhaul of our relatively weak aid infrastructure. This isn't just about more money; it's about better money. It's about having greater impact on the ground where it counts.

The first lesson I think that we arrived at is that moving around the organizational boxes or increasing aid alone won't do enough to boost impact unless there's first really broad agreement reaching into Capitol Hill, into the executive agencies, into the practitioner community, around a unified framework that's designed for 21st century challenges.

That means that we're going to have to integrate the national security perspective that sees foreign assistance as a soft-power tool designed to get strategic bargain with the developmental view of it as a tool that's allocated according to policy effectiveness and needs. We're going to have to find a way to bridge those two perspectives that are too frequently at odds.

Now, none of us are naive to think that U.S. is ever going to have a single objective. The United States is a superpower. We don't have the luxury of being Norway. We're never going to be just about development assistance. That accounts for about 17 percent of our overall foreign assistance. This report is about 100 percent of our foreign assistance. So we look at every piece of the foreign assistance puzzle and connect the dots to things like trade and investment that are increasingly vital.

For those of you who are not familiar with the numbers, America gave about $24 to each Egyptian last year on foreign assistance, about 6 cents to each Indian. Let's look at the poverty indicators; let's look at the governance indicators. They're almost inversely correlated. So the notion that we're doing this now according to governance and need just does not stack up with the numbers.

But we also cannot afford the luxury of pursuing more than 50 objectives, which is how many we have if you count up all the objectives in the legislation, if you count up the objectives over at USAID and in the various agencies that deliver aid. We need a unified framework that narrows down on a limited set of objectives and maps it against the capacities and needs of the governments in question and the countries in question, which Steve Radelet is going to go into some greater detail on. . .

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