Rajiv Shah Sounds Good to Me
Spencer Ackerman reports on considerable internal disgruntlement with Barack Obama’s choice of Rajiv Shah as new head of USAID. You can see where the complaints are coming from, but they also seem pretty unconvincing to me:
Another USAID contractor, in an email forwarded to TWI, had a mixed reaction. The contractor said it was “exciting to see a relatively young, brilliant man take the reigns and perhaps steer [government] aid in a revised direction” and praised the nominee’s management experience. But the contractor, reflecting a sentiment expressed in several of the emails, said Shah’s nomination was “yet another (or maybe a stronger) indication that Obama is shifting from nation building/good governance to heath care and food security initiatives. This may not bode well for D&G,” a shorthand for development and governance.
Foreign aid has a very mixed track record. On the one hand, great things have been achieved in the past in the field of public health and famine prevention. On the other hand, efforts to produce sustained economic growth and foster good governance have tended to fail. Under the circumstances focusing the efforts of an under-resourced aid agency on the fields of endeavor where we know aid can do good and alleviate human suffering seems like a perfectly reasonable choice.
13 Responses to “Rajiv Shah Sounds Good to Me”
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November 12th, 2009 at 11:37 am
Re: But the contractor, reflecting a sentiment expressed in several of the emails, said Shah’s nomination was “yet another (or maybe a stronger) indication that Obama is shifting from nation building/good governance to heath care and food security initiatives.
Good for Obama. A decent and civilised aid programme needs to focus less on ‘good governance’ (i.e. lecturing third world countries on how to run their internal affairs), and more on providing food and medicine to those people who need it.
Every dollar that has been spent on ‘good governance’ initiatives instead of on schools, roads, water wells, fertilizers, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and other things that people really need, is a crying shame. And there have been a h*ll of a lot of such dollars. The third world needs aid, not ideological imperialism.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:44 am
I… agree with Hector. That’s… disorienting.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:54 am
i’ll say this: he has an extraordinarily white pair of teeth.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Hector,
I go back and forth on this.
Obviously, food and medical care are more important than anything else when it comes to mitigating that level of human suffering. What do you do, then, in areas where corruption or lawlessness prevent the local population from receiving the aid.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
On the other hand you could argue that ignoring the D&G piece is simply treating the symptoms and not the diesease (or ‘root causes’ if you will)
And I’m surprised the ‘contracting community’ is at odds with such a shift. It’s crappy and corrupt goverance that helps keep some of them in business.
November 12th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
Given that a lot of our conflicts involve non-state actors, and that these actors often operate under the noses of the often-corrupt governments we’re propping up, this makes sense. We want to be seen as the good guys by as many people as possible, especially when the market value of our current product, “democracy”, is pretty low.
November 12th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
this post and the ensuing comments highlight one of the serious problems with the aid industry. what becomes fashionable in the developed world shifts every few years, so developing countries have no reasonably assurance that whatever is being done today will be sustainable into the future.
November 12th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
It’s another link in the public-private partnership chain.
http://stateofthedivision.blogspot.com/2009/11/usaid-nomination-sets-stage-for-ppp.html
November 12th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I like to tell this story of how the aid program PL480 provided immeasurable benefits both to the USA and to one of its recipients, India.
With only a decade after independence, India suffered massive famines. The PL480 program sold American wheat to India at subsidized prices, and since Indians did not have any foreign currency at the time, in its admirable wisdom the US allowed them to pay for food in the Indian Rupees, which were in turn recycled as aid to India for establishing its higher engineering educational system.
Rest is history. India is now flooded with technical workers who in some form or the other (even if they have not immigrated to the US) provide a steady supply of workers for the new economy here. A side effect that is of great advantage to our security is that India has not evolved into Pakistan.
November 12th, 2009 at 3:05 pm
Maybe I’m mistaken but some of the best good governance aid programs have been embedded in the administration of other more traditional aid. For instance in one country (I believe Uganda) funding of educational aid rarely reached the villages until they decided to post and read aloud notices at every schoolhouse of how much money was supposed to go there. Then the villagers were able to pressure the people spending to make sure that it was actually spent. But thats ed aid not good government aid. If a food or healthcare program is run correctly it can foster good governance, but that isn’t as straight forward as say providing new computers and systems for the central land registry or training junior law clerks or whatever a ‘good governance’ grant is supposed to do.
November 12th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Hector’s right. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, to make a government be more democratic and less corrupt. Worse, “governance” programs often involve funding political parties that adhere to the US’s preferences on things like free trade, financial policy, and economic management, even when those policies actually don’t do anything to improve quality of life for people in the country or even harm it.
Working on things like health, education, food, clean water and disease prevention are far more cost-effective, and can be done through funding to non-profits if the government of the country receiving the aid is highly corrupt or unstable.
And I’m surprised the ‘contracting community’ is at odds with such a shift. It’s crappy and corrupt goverance that helps keep some of them in business.
I’m not. See, one of the meanings of “good governance” is that you treat foreign businesses nice, don’t overtax them, and don’t burden them with things like labour or environmental regulations.
November 12th, 2009 at 8:34 pm
While we can certainly debate the pros and cons of democracy and governance assistance versus economic development (I think they work best in conjunction), part of the problem is the way we distribute our D&G assistance.
Take this recent report on USAID’s D&G programs for Egypt. The audit concludes the programs had only a “limited” impact. However, it also says that direct grants to civil society were the most effective form of assistance. Unfortunately in the case of Egypt, civil society funding was cut by 79% in 2009.
So not only should we evaluate the merits of development versus governance assistance, we should also consider how we can more effectively deliver both.
November 13th, 2009 at 12:29 am
Every dollar that has been spent on ‘good governance’ initiatives instead of on schools, roads, water wells, fertilizers, agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and other things that people really need, is a crying shame.
People “really need” to not have their government steal every thing they have. If governance programs seems ineffective, it is because they are addressing the real problems instead providing superficial, but verifiable band aids which help people for a few months and do nothing to improve the long term outlook.
P.S.
Bluemeanies is right about the Uganda program to publicize government commitments to services. It showed dramatic improvements if people knew the law said they were entitled to receive.