Over the past year, wealthy countries around the world have undermined a decades-old consensus that human dignity is universal and that nations have a responsibility to further it. The shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development, which I led for five years, is just one piece of a broader, tragic retreat from a system of foreign aid that helped cure the sick, feed the hungry and empower the poor.
Countries, including the United States, Canada, Britain and Germany, have slashed billions in assistance. Research published by The Lancet estimates that more than 14 million people could die as a result of American aid cuts alone — 4.5 million of them children younger than 5. This is a moral failure that will make the whole world less safe, less secure and less prosperous.
Amid the tragedy, it is tempting to defend what we know. Fortunately, leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America and elsewhere are building something new. They are taking ownership of their countries’ own development, figuring out ways to leverage new technology and, most important, encouraging private investment — long the single biggest challenge for development projects. Their initiatives are modeling a way to lift up the vulnerable that will be more sustainable in the 21st century.
Eighty or so years ago, powerful nations came together around the concept of universal dignity, codifying that idea into institutions like the United Nations, the World Health Organization and the World Bank. This system helped usher in an era of extraordinary progress: transforming AIDS into a manageable condition, saving millions of children from dying of preventable causes and helping to cut hunger in low-income countries by more than 60 percent from 1970 to 2015. It also benefited donor countries by fighting diseases like Ebola abroad to protect lives at home and turning poorer countries into trade partners that created jobs.
Yet while the system did enormous good, it also faltered as the world changed. That model was funded and thus directed by wealthy countries and centralized in large institutions. Over time, donor support and public support for international institutions proved inadequate, yet aid projects remained dependent on them. The work also increased as overlapping yet siloed initiatives proliferated in large part because the best way to find funding was rallying excitement about each new idea.
In recent years, the African country of Malawi received about 55 percent of its health funding from an estimated 166 external sources. To keep the money flowing in, Malawi had to write up at least 50 different “strategic plans” to secure financing.
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The post Foreign Aid Is Mostly Gone. It’s Being Replaced With Something Better. appeared first on New York Times.
