This weekly posting includes key news stories and opinion pieces related to foreign assistance reform and the larger development community.

• One Month Later, Haiti’s Humanitarian Crisis Remains (Huffington Post-Rajiv Shah, February 12) Despite the human challenges, we are working with the Haitian people and their leaders to focus on tomorrow, even as we face enormous challenges.  With this sense of urgency, the United States will continue to work tirelessly with Haiti and our international partners to identify where each country can best contribute, in order to alleviate this humanitarian crisis and lay the foundation for future Haitian development that reduces the impact such disasters have on Haiti’s population.

• MFAN-related: Aid groups fear Haitian relief diverts funds from other needs (The Washington Post, February 12) Samuel A. Worthington, the president of InterAction, a coalition of more than 150 humanitarian groups, wrote Thursday to top officials at the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development that he was “deeply concerned about the impact” that reductions would have in other regions.  “We’re working very hard to make sure all our programs can continue full speed ahead,” said Susan Reichle, a top USAID official. She said agency officials had started prioritizing projects in different parts of the world in case the congressional funds are slow to arrive or are less than anticipated.

• Only Haitians Can Save Haiti (ForeignPolicy.com-Howard French, February 11) The well-educated diaspora could lead a remake of the educational system, providing a much-needed model for the rollout of other vital services, from public health to justice to agricultural extension and a new fiscal infrastructure. With international support, such a program could fund the presence of returnees from abroad in small towns and villages across the country for fixed terms of perhaps two or three years, during which time they would staff local schools and train indigenous teachers. This training and hiring of locals would spread opportunity through society while it built capacity for future years.

• Good Intentions Gone Wrong (The Globe & Mail, February 9) The problems stem from a combination of the overwhelming number of aid groups operating in Haiti and the lack of government capabilities. Haiti has relied on a patchwork of outside assistance organizations for so long that the government has never learned how to deliver services to the country in the best of times. Add to that a massive disaster and a swarm of hands trying to help, and the abundance of good intentions overwhelmed the scarce capacities of the country and the organizations.

• Rapid city growth threat to Africa’s development: UN (Reuters Africa, February 8) Rapid and chaotic urbanisation is threatening sustainable development in Africa, the head of the U.N. housing agency said on Monday, but taking steps to mitigate climate change could help tackle some of the problems of cities. “After HIV and Aids, the biggest threat to sustainable development in Africa is rapid and chaotic urbanisation, because it is a recipe for disaster for increased tensions and pressure.”

From Josh Rogin at ForeignPolicy.com

Aid Advocates Happy, Not Thrilled with Obama’s New Budget

The global health and humanitarian aid communities are pleased but not thrilled by the Obama administration’s new budget request, which saw modest although lower-than-expected increases in a number of development accounts.

According to calculations by the U.S. Global Leadership Council, an umbrella NGO for the aid community, the overall international affairs budget will see an entire increase of 2.8 percent over fiscal 2010 in the fiscal 2011 budget request, including supplemental funding. And that’s if Congress fulfills the request as is, which is by no means a certainty.

Overall operating accounts for USAID and topline funding for major programs like the Global Health initiative are set to rise significantly in the budget request. But the request signals a shift in priority within the international affairs budget away from longer-term programs and those that have gotten increases in recent years toward smaller, more focused accounts that could show short-term results.

“We are looking forward to Congress accepting this, supporting it in a bipartisan manner as we have seen throughout the last decade,” said USGLC’s executive director Liz Schrayer. “Particularly when at least 250 members of Congress sent a letter to the president last month calling for a robust international affairs budget.”

The budget keeps Obama on track to double U.S. foreign assistance by 2015, said Larry Nowels, a USGLC consultant who worked previously for the Congressional Research Service. The baseline for that promise was a foreign assistance budget of $26 billion and this year’s request falls short at about $41 billion. But even that number is somewhat misleading because a lot of the increase is earmarked just for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“If you look at the 2011 request, it’s more than what we anticipated and more than what Obama campaigned on for Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he said. “What will be really challenging is getting the rest of the money…. The question is on getting Congress to appropriate the funds.”

Larger operating budgets for both State and USAID are a positive step toward another administration pledge, to eventually increase the number of Foreign Service officers by 25 percent. But Deputy Secretary of State Jack Lew admitted yesterday that the timing on this goal has been stretched out in the new budget release.

“We have had to extend the period, but we haven’t changed the goal,” Lew said Monday. “We need to grow. And I think the budget gives us the ability to continue to grow. And the pace of hiring, you know, will only slow down slightly. It will not be a dramatic change.”

The request for the Global Health Initiative, a worldwide program targeting major disease epidemics, was viewed as a mixed picture. The overall account was increased from $7.8 billion to $8.5 billion requested, which is substantial. But within the subaccounts there were winners and losers.

“This budget will get you to about 38 percent of the $63 billion proposal,” said Nowels, referring to the overall pledge for GHI funding. “So there is a lot of work ahead and a lot of assumptions at stake that in the next three years you can come up with the additional resources.”

Maternal and child health funding is going from $550 million to $900 million, with a lot of the new funds focused on nutrition. Neglected tropical diseases accounts could go from $65 to $155 million, reflecting the priority of that issue in the minds of the administration.

Requests in other areas were more modest. Family planning accounts could receive a $65 million increase, which isn’t much, and funding for HIV/AIDs would rise only 2.5 percent in the budget request, much less than previous years’ increases.

The $1 billion request for the Global Fund, an international financing institution also focused on major disease epidemics, is actually less than the $1.05 billion Congress gave for that account in fiscal 2010 money.

Nevertheless, the $600 million or 25 percent increase in USAID’s part of the GHI and the $460 million or 18 percent increase in what’s known as the “development assistance” account show a huge commitment to expanding the development mission, said Sam Worthington, president and CEO of Interaction, a coalition of more than 150 aid organizations. But the modest 2 percent increase in humanitarian assistance is less encouraging.

Despite the rising need for refugee assistance and disaster relief, as evidenced by the Haiti crisis, funding for refugees was cut by 5 percent and USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives was cut by 13 percent. The request for contributions for international organizations would mean an 11 percent decrease or $43 million cut if Congress goes along.

“Interestingly, an administration committed to multilateral work may be looking to work more through the World Bank or other places,” Worthington said.

But overall, the increases requests for operating expenses and staffing at both State and USAID are “clearly a signal of intent for building institutional capacity,” he added. “They’re saying in their request that they want to make a serious investment.”

“For the programs that are accustomed to very steep increases, this is the slowing of the growth rate but it’s still a growing trajectory,” said J. Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “It’s not going to make everyone happy, but it’s a pretty robust proposal.”

“The one message to take away from this is stay tuned.”

Last night at the Society for International Development’s annual Washington awards dinner, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-MA) and Ranking Minority Member Dick Lugar (R-IN) were honored for their efforts to make U.S. foreign assistance more effective, transparent, and accountable.  USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah honored both Kerry and Lugar with an introductory speech, in which he also noted the importance of foreign assistance reform.

Senator Lugar gave a speech entitled “Foreign Assistance and Development in a New Era,” which touched on important aspects of MFAN’s foreign assistance reform agenda.  Key excerpts are below:

“There is probably not a person in this room who would disagree that development is critical for U.S. national security and that the alleviation of poverty and hunger is a key component. This is a sentiment that is shared in most parts of our government, including the Department of Defense.”

“Although diplomacy and development often can be mutually reinforcing, at their core, they have different priorities, resource requirements, and time horizons… Most obviously, diplomacy is far more concerned with solving immediate problems, usually associated with countries of strategic interest.  Although we hope that our development efforts will sometimes yield short-term strategic benefits, that is not their primary purpose. In a development context, we are willing to take a much longer view of the world and devote resources to countries of less, or even minimal, strategic significance. We are willing to allow the diplomatic and national security benefits of development work to accrue over time. And we are willing to engage in missions for purely altruistic reasons. These differences underscore why development must be an independent partner of diplomacy, not merely its servant.”

“Reforming U.S. foreign assistance – in both substance and architecture – has been a priority for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Secretary Clinton has stated:  “I want USAID to be seen as the premier development agency in the world.” I share that sentiment. One of the basic questions with respect to foreign aid reform is how we can best strengthen the capacity of USAID to run effective assistance programs.”

“USAID must have a central role in development policy decisions. If we are to avoid inefficient experimentation, it must have the capacity to evaluate programs and disseminate information about best practices and methods. That requires policy makers to continue augmenting the agency’s staffing and expertise. These principals are reflected in legislation that Senator Kerry and I introduced last year, S. 1524, the Foreign Assistance Revitalization and Accountability Act.”

“[S.1524] has strong support in the aid community. And it is co-sponsored by a bipartisan group of 23 Senators, twelve of whom are members of the Foreign Relations Committee. This level of backing for a bill related to foreign assistance is extremely rare…I am hopeful that the Executive Branch will recognize that a bill co-sponsored by a majority of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and nearly a quarter of the full Senate should be given substantial weight in its review process. A strong development agency that serves under the foreign policy guidance of the Secretary of State, as envisioned in our bill, will best empower her to advance U.S. goals.”