The Foreign Service Journal, October 2011

of the greatest bureaucratic challenges to the U.S. aid program. Foreign af- fairs professionals who have worked on these issues for decades, managing bil- lions of dollars in aid, are unable to spend funds in what they see as the most effective way. Instead, lobbies for various Ameri- can businesses, contractors, consult- ants, farmers, shippers, charities and nonprofit groups such as CARE and Save the Children persuade members of Congress to place earmarks throughout the foreign aid budget. One recent budget for African aid was so thoroughly earmarked that there was literally no money left for aid offi- cials to use for other projects. So the answer to the first question is: Yes, sometimes foreign aid really does help poor nations to develop. It has enabled millions of people in more than a dozen countries to achieve im- proved living standards. But in other countries, aid falls on rocky ground. A lack of security, functioning judicial systems, reliable contracts, honest of- ficials and education deflects the ben- efits of assistance into the hands of corrupt elites. Further, aid is often hobbled by congressional earmarks be- fore it ever leaves the United States. Spending Money Effectively The second question to consider is whether aid funds are being spent on wise, successful programs. This is very difficult to answer, for what works in one region or economic sector may not succeed elsewhere. For instance, building schools was not enough to get families to send girls to school. But once aid experts added girls’ latrines to the schools, giving them privacy and clean facilities, attendance rose. Similarly, when poor children went to school they often failed to learn. Upon investigation, it became clear that many kids’ heads were dropping onto their desks around 11 a.m., not out of boredom but because they’d had no food that morning. Adding break- fasts turned that around. In other countries, parents did not send kids to school because they needed the chores done — washing clothes, feeding chickens, grazing goats. But when authorities gave each child a bottle of cooking oil to take home each month, families sent their children to school. These adaptations came about through trial and error —a system that is precluded by congressional earmarks that require all funds to be spent on prearranged plans and leave nothing for experimentation and reaction to changing needs. Determining whether foreign aid is wise and effective may require spend- ing more money on monitoring and evaluation than the original project cost. Measuring success requires a de- tailed study of conditions and may also involve setting up a control group that gets no aid. Once the project is under way, more monitoring and evaluation are required. Andrew Natsios, USAID Adminis- trator from 2001 to 2005, wrote re- cently that the agency suffers from a system of adversarial inspectors gen- eral whose goal is to root out fraud and corruption, but who make aid officials afraid to take any risks. In a CGD publication last year, Natsios wrote that U.S. foreign aid is sometimes paralyzed by “the counter- bureaucracy — a set of U.S. govern- ment agencies charged with command and control of the federal bureaucracy through a set of budgeting, oversight, accountability and measurement sys- tems.” These agencies, he said, have grown over several decades to a mas- sive degree, with extraordinary layer upon layer of procedural and compli- ance requirements. Natsios, who went from the helm of USAID to a professorship at George- town University, adds that “under- taking development work in poor countries with weak institutions in- volves a high degree of uncertainty and risk. Aid agencies are under constant scrutiny by policymakers and bureau- cratic regulatory bodies to design sys- tems and measures to reduce that risk. “In practice, this means compro- mising good development practices such as local ownership, a focus on in- stitution building, decentralized deci- sion-making and long-term program planning horizons.” So the answer to the second ques- tion is also: Yes, sometimes foreign as- sistance programs are wise and effective. Some three decades after USAID helped set up fish canneries in Latin America, they still provide work and fish to many people. But in Yemen, the trauma of war and the ad- diction to qat have wiped away many of the benefits from U.S. scholarships and other aid over the years. Working in War Zones The third question we must ask is: How can civilian aid workers and pro- grams succeed in combat zones? This was a huge issue during the Vietnam War, when thousands of USAID ex- perts lived — and quite a few died — carrying out projects, but still failed to prevent a communist victory. The issue resurfaced during the George W. Bush administration when the Penta- gon asked for aid teams to win hearts and minds, as well as to furnish jobs and benefits that might undercut the Earmarks are one of the greatest bureaucratic challenges to the U.S. foreign assistance program. 48 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 1 1