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“No maple leaf is big enough to hide the shame of Canada’s summit of broken promises,” said Mark Fried, spokesperson for Oxfam. “The G8’s failure will leave a sad legacy of kids out of school, denied medicines for the sick, and no food for the hungry.”
With total G8 aid frozen, their five billion dollar commitment to maternal health will likely be taken from vital areas such as education and food, cautioned Oxfam.
“This year the headline is maternal health, last year it was food. With overall aid frozen, the G8 are just shuffling the same money around to different pots,” said Fried. “The only promise that counts is the Gleneagles one to increase aid by $50 billion by 2010 and that is the one they have abandoned today.”
At the last G8 Summit, donors pledges $22 billion over three years to support agriculture in developing countries, but Oxfam calculates that at most $6 billion of this is new money and they are double counting it to pay for other initiatives, such as helping poor countries cope with climate change.
“There are a billion hungry people in the world but it seems the G8 are out to lunch. Instead of new money for old promises, we got old money, re-pledged, recycled and renamed,” said Fried. “Oxfam asks France, as next year’s G8 host, to offer real accountability and resuscitate the G8’s flagging commitment to the world’s poor.”
As focus now shifts to the G20, Oxfam is encouraged by the place development issues have garnered on the agenda, and called on leaders to give poor countries a seat at the table.
“The G20 mustn’t repeat the G8’s mistake of only inviting Africa for the photo ops,” said Fried.
Oxfam also urged the G20 to adopt a financial transaction tax to raise the funds necessary to fight poverty and climate change.
"After the scandal of the G8's broken promises, the G20 now has the chance to stand up and deliver for the world's poor,” said actor and Oxfam Global Ambassador Bill Nighy in Toronto. "A Robin Hood Tax on banks is a simple but brilliant idea to raise hundreds of billions of dollars to help millions of poor people who have been hit hardest by global economic downturn, hunger and climate change."
]]>Gregory Adams, Director of Aid Effectiveness for Oxfam America, said: “The Global Health Initiative represents an opportunity to change the way we do global health overseas: from a top-down, uncoordinated approach to country owned, demand-driven health aid that saves lives both now and in the future.”
In the pilot countries, US aid for global health is expected to begin the shift toward country ownership and away from the bureaucratic “stovepipes” that can sometimes stand in the way of care. The US approach to global health has been largely uncoordinated across more than 12 US agencies that implement global health programs overseas, which results in burdensome reporting requirements for countries. If fully embraced and implemented, the updated plan will have the potential to more adequately strengthen local health systems, and shift global health aid to where it is needed most.
"The Global Health Initiative could be a step in the right direction,” said the former Minister of Health of Mozambique, Dr Francisco Songane. “It is extremely important to take a comprehensive approach and in a long term perspective, assisting the countries in need in the implementation of their development strategies. The initiative gives primacy to the needs of women and children, including the newborn, which underscores the centrality of the family for the improvement of the health status and socio-economic development, while highlighting the urgency of having functional health systems."
Oxfam America anticipates the release of the implementation roadmap in late summer, and the rollout of the program beyond the pilot countries to all 80 countries where the US provides global health assistance. Crucial to this rollout will be full integration into broader efforts to make US aid more effective.
Adams said: “In advance of the MDG Summit in September, we hope the Obama Administration will incorporate the GHI plan into a unified global development strategy for fighting poverty and disease.”
]]>Two weeks after a leaked draft of the National Security Council document entitled “A New Way Forward for Global Development” signaled the Obama Administration stepping up efforts to reform US efforts to fight global poverty, today’s discussion focused on the importance of letting recipient countries lead development programs and plans. The United States has an opportunity to unravel the confusion and dysfunction of US development programs and set clear goals and priorities, making way for a donor strategy that empowers local communities to fight corruption and hold their governments accountable
“Aid, used in smart ways, can save lives and help people pull themselves out of poverty. But 60 years of foreign assistance have shown that donor countries cannot fix the problems of poor people by themselves, no matter how well donors understand development,” said panelist Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America. “For US foreign assistance to empower citizens and ensure equitable growth, we need a clear US strategy for fighting global poverty. The President must issue his US Strategy for Global Development, so our aid will be driven by the needs and priorities of poor people, and will put recipient countries in the lead.”
The discussion was moderated by Josh Rogin, blogger for Foreign Policy’s “The Cable” and included Esther Tallah, Manager of Cameroon Coalition Against Malaria and board member of UNITAID as well as the Honorable Minister Amara M. Konneh, Minister of Planning and Economic Affairs of Liberia.
The event was the fourth in a series hosted by Oxfam America to discuss how the United States can improve aid to the developing world. The three prior events brought African leaders, former Afghan Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, and the Haitian Ambassador to the United States, His Excellency Raymond Joseph, together to share experiences and offer their assessment of ongoing discussions in Congress and at all levels in the Obama Administration on foreign assistance reform.
In addition to the public panel, Oxfam America organized a workshop with Obama Administration officials, Congressional staffers, development experts, and private sector leaders to discuss how US development policy can better provide for recipient country ownership by engaging civil society to determine country-specific priorities and needs.
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This panel considers three important policy processes now underway—the Quadrennial Diplomacy & Development Review (QDDR) being advanced by the State Department, the Presidential Study Directive (PSD) being carried out by the National Security Council to review US global development policy, and efforts to rewrite the US Foreign Assistance Act within the US Congress—and the historic opportunity they offer to reshape US foreign assistance and global development policy to be more effective, coherent and integrated. It brings NGO perspectives, drawn from decades of working in poor communities worldwide, together with US government policy perspectives.
Moderated by: Professor Nicholas Burns, Professor of the Practice of Diplomacy and International Politics, Harvard Kennedy School
Featuring
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In a second event co-hosted by Oxfam America and Foreign Policy that brought developing world leaders to DC to discuss improving U.S. foreign aid, Dr. Ashraf Ghani, who engineered Afghan economic reforms as finance minister under President Hamid Karzai, Orazio J. Bellettini, executive director of good government organization Grupo Faro in Ecuador, and Vivek Ramkumar, manager of the Open Budget Initiative at the International Budget Partnership highlighted the critical importance of transparency and predictability to overall aid effectiveness.
"American aid is too volatile,” said Dr. Ghani. “This is because it has to be approved by an annual Congressional budgetary process – approval is often delayed and money is then rushed to be spent. Predictability, through sharing information with governments, citizens and civil society, is the prerequisite to transparency and mutual accountability."
Since the first Oxfam-Foreign Policy event on the topic in July, the aid reform debate has accelerated. In late-September, Oxfam released Ownership in Practice: The Key to Smart Development, a major report with policy recommendations calling for the U.S. to “strengthen the voice of poor people and the responsiveness of the state” as part of any aid reform effort.
The Obama Administration and Congress have also created unprecedented momentum for reform:
Last week, the Obama Administration also took the long-awaited step of nominating an Administrator for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). If confirmed, the nominee, Dr. Rajiv Shah, would hopefully be the lead development voice in the foreign aid reform process and major foreign policy decisions by the Obama Administration.
“Leaders and citizens of developing countries want more ownership of the development process,” said Paul O’Brien, Oxfam America’s vice president of policy and advocacy. “For U.S. policymakers to transform U.S. development policy, they must increase aid transparency and deliver timely, predictable information to aid recipients. This would give them a real stake in building a better future for themselves.”
]]>“Oxfam America welcomes the Obama administration’s announcement of Dr. Rajiv Shah as USAID Administrator. With solid experience in international agriculture and health, Shah is well positioned to lead this crucial US agency.
“We look forward to working with Shah and USAID to reinvigorate and restore the agency’s capacity to lead US development efforts around the world. Oxfam America believes that a commitment to modernizing US government development assistance can have a lasting impact on global poverty and that, over time, smart development will enhance US moral standing and national interests and ultimately build a safer world for all.
“Shah assumes responsibility over USAID at a crucial moment in history. For many years, USAID has been under-resourced and politically marginalized. But today’s international challenges – from the financial crisis to climate change -- make it more important than ever to rebuild USAID from a compliance agency for NGOs and contractors to what it once was: the world's most prestigious development agency.
“Shah’s challenges are great. He must work within a legal framework that is almost half a century old. US development efforts have become diffuse and USAID’s development objectives unclear, with the Pentagon and more than 20 other federal agencies increasingly engaged in development activities. There is a need to reassert the leadership role of USAID in managing US overseas development assistance, and strengthen its ability to deliver concrete results that will enhance USAID’s standing and credibility. Most importantly, there is a need for a national global development strategy to guide the US government's efforts to fight global poverty.
“But there’s also growing momentum for a new era in US foreign aid, with a number of processes already underway that will reshape US global development policy. Additionally, bipartisan legislation has been introduced in both the House and Senate to initiate foreign aid reform, as well as strengthen and elevate USAID.”
“Oxfam America is eager to work with Shah as he contributes to this effort to make US development programs more effective.”
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