The Foreign Service Journal, June 2006

In Afghanistan, USAID efforts have contributed to rebuilding infra- structure and supporting increased agricultural production. In fact, we have paid more than $15 million in wages through a “cash-for-work” pro- gram to approximately 194,000 farm- ers to provide a viable alternative to poppy cultivation. The agency has worked hard to improve over 6,000 kilometers of irrigation canals cover- ing 290,000 hectares of farmland. Consequently, agricul- tural output has risen substantially, with cereal output increasing by 24 percent and livestock and poultry pro- duction yielding an additional $200 million annually. Since 2001, over 170,000 students (58 percent of them young women) have participated in USAID’s Accelerated Learning Program which is educating adult women who were denied access to schooling under the Taliban. More than 60,000 former combatants have given up their weapons and are reintegrating into the civilian labor force. Some seven million Afghans (70 percent of them women and children) now have better access to quality health services. Similar successes have been achieved in the Iraq reconstruction effort, particularly in education and health. As of September 2005, over 2,800 Iraqi schools had been rehabilitated and 45 constructed. Over 47,500 secondary school teachers and administrators had received training. USAID has edited, printed and distributed 8.7 million Iraqi math and science textbooks. School supplies have been distributed to one million primary, and two million secondary, schoolchildren. In addition, sports equipment has been distributed to every school. USAID-supported emergency campaigns in 2005 alone immunized 98 per- cent of Iraqi children between 1 and 5 years of age (3.62 million) against measles, mumps and rubella and 9 per- cent of children under 5 (4.56 million) against polio. USAID partners have trained 11,400 staff at over 2,000 community-based centers in almost every province to manage malnutrition in children. Admittedly, these efforts came with a significant cost in human life. Nearly 150 staff of USAID-funded part- ner organizations were killed implementing this massive effort, the largest loss of life the agency has sustained since the VietnamWar. Many of those killed were select- ed because USAID programs were a softer target of opportunity than taking on the U.S. military directly, which insurgents quickly learned could be quite costly to their forces. Fixing Our Foreign Assistance Structure Severe understaffing remains one of the most serious problems facing the agency. Nine new USAID mis- sions — mostly in the Islamic world — were opened during the past five years, even as the agency experienced severe staff and operating-expense shortages. This situation is a grim legacy of the 1990s, when USAID lost nearly 35 percent of its Civil Service and Foreign Service staff through a reduction in force and retirements. Most of these positions have never been replaced, even during the subsequent period of new mis- sions and budgetary expansion. Instead, the agency hired contractor staff and Foreign Service Nationals to provide surge capacity in the new missions. While these employ- ees are able and dedicated, they are not direct hires of the U.S. government, do not fully understand the business systems of the agency and perform functions that, in my view, only direct hires should be carrying out. Furthermore, when FSNs and contractors take jobs in other institutions, their departure deprives the agency of historical memory and technical expertise. I once asked a government minister who was engaged in a fight to stop corruption within his government to identify the most important thing the agency did for him. He replied that the technical assistance from NGOs was useful and the funding was helpful, but what made a crit- ical difference was having a USAID FSO down the street who helped him with strategizing, recruiting and plan- ning. It is not an overstatement to say that the USAID staff of each mission is the program, providing the tech- nical expertise to design projects, advising government ministries struggling with policy reform, and helping civil society organizations implement their projects. These officers have traditionally spent much of their time work- ing alongside local counterparts to ensure that programs are effective or get them back on track. With impending retirements, the agency will shortly have fewer than 1,000 Foreign Service officers; in my view it needs at least double that to do its job properly. So F O C U S J U N E 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 USAID’s increasing reliance on contractors and FSNs is exacerbating chronic funding problems.