By David Holdridge Humanitarian aid workers with experience in the field bring an intimate perspective to the question of foreign assistance reform.   For decades, my colleagues and I have borne witness to how foreign assistance has met the reality overseas with negative consequences: negative for U.S. citizens and of little sustainable value for the intended [...]

By Sherine Jayawickrama A newly-published essay by Andrew Natsios – who served as USAID Administrator from 2001 to 2006 – lays bare the tension between the compliance side of aid bureaucracies and the programmatic side of those same agencies.  He argues that the balance has now tipped so strongly toward compliance that the integrity of [...]

By Ellen Knickmeyer Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, believes he knows what it takes to make the Afghan government more effective: funnel billions of dollars of U.S. aid directly into President Hamid Karzai’s ministries. Holbrooke, since late summer, has begun calling for the United States to send 40 to [...]

by Tony Pipa Over 2,000 pages, 500 contributors, and 20 reports: The Center for U.S. Global Engagement recently released a “report of reports” summarizing the various calls to elevate global development in U.S. foreign policy and modernize U.S. foreign assistance.  Given the activity over the past two years, it is clear that the changes instituted [...]

(I originally posted this on Tuesday 11/11/08 and it mysteriously disappeared, so I’m reposting.  Unless there’s been foul play from a new philanthropist acolyte, I can only chalk it up to a site glitch.  Apologies for the redundancy.) It is a truth almost universally acknowledged, at least by NGO leaders and international development policy experts, [...]