US Foreign Policy Priorities 2012

In the next 11 months, the United States will drive its development agenda alongside its diplomatic priorities as part of efforts to harness a “decade of opportunities” in overseas engagement.

Jake Sullivan, director of policy planning at the U.S. Department of State, in a recent interview stated that one of the country’s foreign policies for 2012 is to “consolidate the efforts that we have undertaken to shift from a decade of war and a focus on threats” to a “decade of opportunities.”

Video link here.

Among these opportunities are to push development alongside diplomacy — a push backed and initiated by U.S. President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The United States will also continue supporting democratic transactions in the Middle East and Africa, expanding engagement in Asia and the Pacific, and deepening partnerships with Central and South American countries, Sullivan said.

Answering questions at a recent webchat with journalists across the globe, Sullivan also hinted at U.S. development priorities in Caribbean and Africa as well as countries like Bangladesh, where health and agriculture are key focus sectors. In the Carribean, Sullivan said the United States will continue its extensive programming to curb the spread of AIDS and provide treatment to people living with HIV. This commitment is in line with Clinton’s vision of an AIDS-free generation, he added. Improving Africa’s trade sector is also to remain an important development and diplomatic priority for the United States. Sullivan said “it is an incredibly important priority for the Secretary and for this Administration” to promote job growth and business in the region.

Asking for UN Reform

The United States unveiled Jan. 20 a comprehensive U.N. reform agenda based on four pillars: economy, accountability, integrity and excellence. The United States wants to see a leaner budget, smaller staff, better procurement practices and stricter fraud sanctions at the United Nations in the coming years.

The agenda outlines the reforms and changes the country, which is the U.N.’s top budget contributor, intends to pursue and support over the next few years.

Why Reform Matters: The United States has led at the UN since its creation because a strong, effective UN is among the best tools we have to tackle the world’s most pressing challenges. The UN works to prevent conflict and keep peace, to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and to isolate terrorists, criminals and despots. The UN goes where nobody else will to provide desperately needed humanitarian and development assistance to the world’s neediest people; and promotes universal values that Americans cherish, including human rights, democracy, and equality.

The UN shares the burdens of global security among all nations, rather than leaving the United States to manage them alone. The Obama Administration is committed to achieving a reformed and renewed UN that saves lives, keeps the peace, seeds development, finds common solutions to the urgent problems of a new century, operates effectively —and lives within its means.

This comprehensive UN reform agenda is based on four key pillars: economy, accountability, integrity, and excellence. 

Economy: A Leaner UN. Every dollar sent to the UN represents the hard work of a taxpayer somewhere, and any dollar wasted at the UN is a wasted opportunity to build a better, freer, more prosperous world. The United Nations should face these tough economic times by tightening its belt and doing more with less.

Accountability: A Cleaner UN. Taxpayers around the world deserve to know exactly how the money they send to the UN is spent and to have confidence that every dollar, euro or yen is handled honestly and well. The UN has made important advances in recent years, but much more remains to be done to strengthen oversight mechanisms, ethics enforcement, whistleblower protection, and transparency. 

Integrity: A Respected UN. As a founding member, host country, and largest contributor, the United States has a particular interest in seeing that the UN lives up to its founding principles and values and standing firm against actions by member states that discredit the UN and the important work it does. 

Excellence: An Effective UN. Billions of people depend, many for their lives, on crucial UN services. They deserve a UN that delivers real results and that performs – from senior officials in New York to front-line implementers in African villages – to the highest standard of excellence.

Read complete details of the proposal here.

The Bellagio Initiative

New ideas for advancing well being in the developing world emerge on a daily basis.

The Bellagio Initiative is a series of global consultations to produce a new framework for philanthropic and international development collaboration in pursuit of human wellbeing in the 21st century. The project is led by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the Resource Alliance and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Throughout 2011 and moving into 2012, the Initiative is engaging a diverse international group of practitioners, opinion leaders, social entrepreneurs and donors to consider innovative solutions to some of the major challenges affecting poor people today. The Initiative is built on Global Dialogue meetings with key constituencies around the world, commissioned papers and a recent Summit which was held in Winter 2011 at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Italy.

The Rockefeller Foundation is continually seeking out a wide range of partners – entrepreneurs, activists, technological innovators, social innovators, government leaders and others who are constantly experimenting to find new ways to solve the challenges they confront. In convening the Bellagio Initiative, they provided a forum to listen to those partners and their innovative solutions for the philanthropic and development communities.

In particular, at the Bellagio Initiative Summit in November they brought some of these partners together, giving them the chance to expand their networks and source new ideas. A full in-depth report on the Initiative will be released later in 2012. For now, it's possible to hear just a few of the insights that emerged from the Summit. Watch the video for key moments and learnings now:

The video includes contributions from Bellagio Initiative delegates, including: 

Caroline Anstey, World Bank James Chen, Chen Yet-Sen Family Foundation Jay Naidoo, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition Malcolm Bruce, UK House of Commons Roberto Bissio, Social Watch Samia Yaba Nkrumah, Member of Parliament, Ghana Tariq Cheema, World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists.

Trends in Development 2012

At the end of the year, Isobel Coleman writing for the Council of Foreign Relations identifies three major trends for international development in the coming year. The full article is linked here. 

An excerpt is below: 

As the world adjusts to seven billion people, and begins its creep toward eight billion, doing more with less will become increasingly important...   Greater efficiency and effectiveness in development is paramount. 

Three trends to watch in the coming year that can help improve development outcomes. 

 1) mHealth and mGovernance Applying mobile phone technology to global health challenges has huge potential to improve health outcomes... MHealth is still in its infancy, but the potential is there for some transformative improvements to health care delivery in rural areas. MGovernance is also an area to watch. Mobile phones are becoming a tool for governments to communicate information, build connections with citizens, and receive feedback, particularly in countries with little infrastructure. 

2) Agricultural Productivity As competition for resources becomes more intense in the coming decades, dramatically increasing how efficiently we use available resources – in particularly, energy, food and water – will be a critical part of the solution to closing the gap between supply and demand... In the horn of Africa, poor governance and climate conditions have combined to create chronic food shortages and famines...  As drought spreads to West Africa, innovations in this field will be another important trend to watch in 2012. 

3) Establishing Identity Registering minorities and women allows them better access to legal channels to claim their rights, whether that is to report a crime, dispute ownership of land or other property, or gain access to social services and education. Gaining state recognition is certainly the first step for the 12 million stateless people in the world, but it is also the first step to citizenship for billions of people in developing countries that have no official identity... Other countries with millions of unregistered citizens, who in some places are disproportionately women, should watch closely.

Comparable Aid Effectiveness Ratings

Aidrating.org strives to contribute to better aid by measuring effectiveness/impact of interventions and making them comparable. In order to achieve this, they support full project related transparency by donors and contracting agencies. 

The measurement is standardized and expressed quantitatively on an absolute scale. This allows full comparison at all levels: Between donors, projects, project types, etc. The concept focuses on project relevant information which can be aggregated to provide a full overview. It has been tested with Swiss agencies, but can be applied to any donor, project or implementing agency. 

See the 10 Questions to Analyze Any Development Project here. 

A “universal evaluation standard” should have the in-built capability of allowing to adapt to future improvements and developments without having to greatly modify or drop older experiences for lack of compatibility. This is best done if the criteria are broad enough to accommodate new findings within them rather than having to add new ones. The criteria list, once again, is therefore essential and will necessarily have to be wide. 

It seems a daunting task to find and define a standard which satisfies all these requirements. AidRating professionals think that it is a worthwhile effort to try and see whether this is possible, and how such requirements could be met in practice. Because of this, they have attempted to design an evaluation framework which is capable to fulfill all these requirements. They report that they have found one and present it for discussion and possible further development. 

This is an abridged version of a longer article. It can be found under ”Universal Evaluation Standard” at this link.

Micro-development: Lend, Produce & Enjoy

In August 2010, just over a year ago, an online lending platform called The Hoop Fund launched, inviting users to "lend," "produce" and "enjoy" products from dark chocolate quinoa to hand-woven cardigans. 

Building on Kiva's model, The Hoop supports the fair trade movement, and helps fund small businesses in developing countries. But The Hoop reserves its finances for co-ops to improve labor conditions and product quality by funding new resources. 

CEO Patrick Donahue wrote on The Hoop Blog, "We were excited about how enthusiastically people responded to our vision of "invested consumption" how we each can invest in the makers of great products in the developing world, and create our own personal stories about how we turned our consumption into something more meaningful." 

Read a recent Devex interview with Donahue here. 

As reported in a FastCompany article, that thinking led Marc Mathieu, a former marketing executive at Coca-Cola, to co-found The Hoop Fund, a new type of marketplace where consumers can shop while also investing in a sustainable supply chain. 

On The Hoop web site, you can make loans in $25 increments to support fair trade worker cooperatives in Peru, Thailand, and Indonesia. You can also buy a bar of chocolate or a wool sweater from the companies supplied by these co-ops. Once the loan is paid back, you can re-lend it to another Hoop project or use that money to make a purchase. "We're linking two ends of the value chain," Mathieu says. "I like chocolate, I eat chocolate, but I also promote this chocolate among my friends because I am personally invested in the change that this chocolate is trying to create at the producer level." 

The idea for The Hoop was first hatched by Deborah Hirsch, a fair trade expert who was struck by the success of online microlending platforms like Kiva. She partnered with entrepreneur Patrick Donohue, who had a track record of several successful enterprises in developing countries. "We thought, why can't this model be used for fair trade producers?" Donohue says. Hirsch and Donahue were on track to start a modest business when Social Capital Markets (Socap) conference co-founder Kevin Jones offered them funding and introduced them to branding superstar Mathieu. While Hirsch and Donohue drove the logistics, Mathieu utilized his marketing expertise to come up with the logo and the idea of the lend-produce-enjoy cycle that The Hoop is named for. 

Donohue acknowledges his platform's similarities to sites like Kiva and MYC4 but points to some key differences. "Kiva is a non-profit; most of their revenue comes from donations," he says. "Our business model is around driving sales for the products." 

The Hoop takes a cut of all products sold on the site, and gets promotional fees from partnering brands to keep our loans at 0% interest. Because the suppliers are established coops, there is less risk of loan defaults. Ultimately, The Hoop aims to change the producer-consumer paradigm to something a lot more connected. "When people start looking at their products in a different way and think about where things come from, they start pulling that into everyday decision-making," said Donohue. "The impact we hope to have is a shift in consumer value where people can say, 'there's a shift because I invested in it.'" 

The Chronicle of Philanthropy interviewed Donahue on how the site creates a sense of emotional investment in the products we purchase: "If you invest in the production of coffee, that's your coffee too," he says. "So you can go out and say to your friends and family, 'I helped make this cup of coffee. You should try it out.'" 

Venture Capital Approaches for Aid

The U.S. Agency for International Development has launched the Development Innovation Ventures program to apply venture capital approaches to innovation in development. The idea is to use these methods to accelerate development outcomes while reducing the cost.

A model is to learn from the methods used in Silicon Valley and other innovation corridors that have fostered private sector innovation at blazing speed for decades. They could be useful in accessing the new capital flows in the developing world. Both academic testing and the venture finance models should jump the foreign assistance fence and become part of standard practice – a new development paradigm. 

The Innovative Ventures concept uses staged financing much like the Angel Investors in the Silicon Valley. DIV starts with small amounts of money to source and test promising ideas. Once the proof of concept is done, a little more is invested to find out if the market will actually adopt this innovation. And only then, once there is clear evidence that the innovation is working, larger amounts are invested to widely deploy the solution. 

It does not matter whether the innovation is planned to scale through the private or public sector. The emphasis from the beginning is that the idea must have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people and be sustainable in the long term without continued infusion of donor dollars. 

In just one year of operation, USAID is already seeing impressive results through DIV. One innovation is showing a 97 percent reduction in a self-test for the second most common reason moms die in childbirth. Another reduced fraud in the polling centers where it was deployed in elections last year in Afghanistan. Based on these results, it was used in the Ugandan elections with similar success. 

Maura O'Neill, the Chief Innovation Officer for USAID, writes in a recent Devex blog that "We know if we are to continue our quest in the development community to get cheaper, faster, more sustainable development outcomes, we need to grab great ideas from wherever they come. We need to seek real evidence that they can work at scale. We look forward to others building on the innovative financing methods so we might all learn together. Millions are counting on us. Time is not our friend. What methods are you finding that work?"