The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

16 NOVEMBER 2012 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL SITE OF THE MONTH: Education and Assistance for Federal Employees B ack in 1986 a group of dedicated individuals, mostly leaders of large federal unions or management associa- tions, began meeting informally to identify ways to meet common challenges: How do I keep and retain good employ- ees?Will I be able to save enough to send my kids to college? What happens if an unexpected medical bill puts me or an employee over the edge?Who stands up for us when the going gets tough? Those discussions led to the establishment of th e Federal Employee Education and Assistance Fund a s a community of federal employees who would support each other in times of need. Twenty-six years later, FEEA has expanded to oper- ate many different programs, including scholarships for the surviving children of fallen diplomats. The Department of State and the Department of Defense jointly set up the FEEADiplomatic Fund in August 1995 to assist the families of three individuals killed while on a diplomatic mission in Bosnia. The Federal Diplomatic Family Assistance Fund-Africa, added after the August 1998 bomb- ings of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, is help- ing to defray the costs of a college education for the children of the 12 Americans killed in the bombings. A$100,000 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foun- dation in December 2004 and a 2008 fundraising campaign increased the resources available for these scholarships to $34,000 per child, spread out across four years. The goal is to raise enough money to give full scholarships to all stu- dents who lose a diplomatic parent to terrorism. To commemorate the lives and service of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, TyroneWoods and Glen Doherty, all killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in Benghazi, members may make donations via credit card by visiting www.feea.org/Give an d choosing “Diplomatic Fund” from the drop-down list of funds. Donations via check, made out to “FEEADiplomatic Fund,”may be sent to: FEEAHeadquarters, 3333 S.Wadsworth Blvd., Suite 300, Lakewood, CO 80227. All donations are tax deductible. Making U.S. Aid More Transparent A merican foreign assistance programs are becoming more transparent, but still do not publish most aid information. So says Publish What You Fund: The Global Campaign for Aid Transparency in its 2012 Aid Transparency Index. This edition of the annual report ranked 72 global aid organizations in terms of their programs’ transparency at three separate levels—organization, country and activity/project—using 43 indicators that reflect commonly available data for which commitments to disclosure already exist. The programs evaluated are those of bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as climate finance and development finance institutions. They represent 37 countries, four United Nations agencies and two private foundations. The Index specifically examines five U.S. agencies—the U.S. Agency for International Development, State, Defense, Treasury and the Millennium Challenge Corporation—and one program, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. Among them, the top performer in terms of transparency was the MCC, which ranked ninth out of the 72 total donors. The Defense Department received the lowest ranking among the U.S. agencies, 56th. Other rankings include: USAID (27th), PEPFAR (29th), Treasury (34th) and State (46th). Overall, the United States came in slightly above average compared to all donors surveyed, but performed relatively poorly against other very large donors, such as the World Bank and the European Commission. However, American aid agencies made significant jumps in their scores over last year. Treasury posted the fifth-highest increase of all agencies in the 2012 Index (18 percentage points), while PEPFAR, USAID, MCC and Defense all ranked among the 15 biggest improvers. Publish What You Fund also urges all donors to sign and implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative, which sets a global common standard for publishing aid information. Foreign assistance published to this standard is shared openly in a timely, comprehensive, comparable and accessible way. IATI currently has 33 signatory donors, including the United States, that collectively account for more than three-quarters of official development finance.