Yesterday from a deliriously happy press release of Publish What You Fund:
Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), Chairman of the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, today introduced the Initiating Foreign Assistance Reform Act of 2009 (HR 2139), a bipartisan bill designed to increase accountability and improve the effectiveness of U.S. foreign aid
The bill:
instructs federal agencies to make aid information on a detailed country-by-country and program-by-program basis in a comprehensive, timely, comparable, and accessible fashion.
Could we dream that USAID would one day provide aid-watching citizens with basic information, as opposed to treating them like enemy combatants? That USAID could be more like its British cousin DFID, that instead of us spending weeks in getting a simple question still not answered, we could get an answer in 5 minutes?
That this could even change USAID’s behavior, so that egregious waste and diversion of funds are no longer seen as a good reason to keep doing business as usual?
As always, a timely response from USAID on these questions would be welcome.
6 Comments
Dear “Aid Watch” blog team (Mr. Easterly?),
First of all, I want to tell you what you probably already know (but it’s always nice to hear it from someone else): The “Aid Watch” blog is fantastic. The posts are well-written, well-informed, intelligent, provocative, and accessible for the layman. The range of subjects and the writing styles make what could be tough sledding very enjoyable reading. I love that you can go from Bono and Starbucks to a detailed analysis of the Quick Response program and aid-tying. Impressive!
Anyway, suffice to say we love your blog and we would like to give the work of “Aid Watch” more exposure here in the United States and around the world.
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Indeed, that would be really nice of them to share a bit information on their programs, not only with US tax payers but also with other agencies working towards (hopefully) similar goals.
As a consultant working mostly to gather aid data in Afghanistan so that efforts are not duplicated, and decently “cooperative” strategies can be designed, I have been many times confronted to USAID’s lack of communication.
A few years back, I was extremely happy to hear about a nice initiative: USAID asked all its contractors in Afghanistan to regularly fill a comprehensive and centralized database. This seems an awesome tool for the aid community (www.geobase.org.af). Unfortunately, despite many tries (even involving various Afghan ministries), we have never been granted access, nor could we have any extract from this database…
lets hope this is a trend and that some metrics of success start entering the community followed by independant audits. the positive effect on chanelling resources to the most effective projects.
I look forward to projects that are less about feeling good on the front end and more about doing measurable good on the back end.
Having worked on USAID contracts, and knowing many people in the agency, I still found it very frustrating to get very simple questions answered. A great deal of the problem was not that they didn’t want to give the information to me, but that they had no way to collect it or disaggregate it.
Get me the list for Nepal so I can go see for myself what USAID is doing here. I’d love to see some actual aid taking place. We (the US) get a lot of grief here in Nepal for lip service and not action. I totally understand Nepal’s take on that. It’s really hard to find the aid in action. After 8 years here I see so little has changed.
For example while the UN has what seems to be an army of Land Cruisers for human rights watching and frequently spouts off advice to Nepal about human right in its political actions. Yet ten minutes from my house there are rug factories where workers are bonded servants and not a Land Cruiser from the UN, USAID or anyone else ever out front watching the human rights violation that goes on there. To most Nepalis we raise money in their name and spend it on ourselves here instead of on them.
Interestingly, HR 2139 is the result of a year and a half of hard-fought advocacy from some of the same interest groups you have maligned for uncritically seeking more aid. To read how we made it happen, and how we hope it’s only the beginning of wholesale reform: Modernizingmodernizingforeignassistance.net