Repairing US Foreign Aid Measures

Developing countries have been left in the proverbial dust as the rest of the world has developed in rapid succession. The result has been populations of people all over the developing world being left in poverty and with a very poor quality of life. As the disparity between the developed and the developing world has grown, a sense of responsibility to provide them help has also risen. For the majority of these nations, there have been some enormous successes, but there are others who have seen no change. While the truth is that all of these countries were either one measure of success or another, aid has contributed to the common good of people globally and helped millions more living in dire conditions. Aid is helpful in terms of what it is designed to do; the problem lies in how aid is administered. The United States has been an active participant in administering aid to developing nations and in studying its effectiveness as well as the oversight of programs provided in order to affect change. Current aid has helped the peoples of developing nations in substantial ways, but the United States efforts have had a limited impact and there is still desperate call for aid. The need for more aid demonstrates that the United States needs new policies. If the United States wants to foster development in the developing world, then they need to increase aid, but they need to change the kind of aid they are providing.

In the debate, Poverty: Can Foreign Aid Reduce Poverty? Jeffery Sachs, from The Earth Institute at Columbia University, points out that the “national and international efforts to promote economic development around the world during the past fifty years have been highly successful, with the notable exception of large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, which remain trapped in extreme poverty. The biggest development successes have come in Asia, a vast region with more than half the world’s population” (Sachs & Ayittey, 2012). While Sachs recognizes that there have been failures in providing aid, he also argues that the progress that has been made has been extremely beneficial. He cites, for example, eradication and the near eradication of old-world diseases like Smallpox and polio, the implementation of family planning, treatment for the HIV/AIDS virus, just to name a few. These huge leaps in development have not only had dramatic impacts for the collective populations in developing nations, but they have ultimately been positive contributions to health the world over. The progress aid has provided has helped developing nations, by and large, grow and become more sustainable.

Moreover, Stephen Kosack writes in his study, Effective Aid: How Democracy Allows Development Aid to Improve the Quality of Life, about the fact that “aid increases quality-of-life growth in democracies and decreases it in autocracies. In addition, it seems that democracies, absent aid, have lower quality-of-life growth than autocracies” (Kosack, 2003). To credit Sachs’ point, Kosack agrees that aid is helpful, but his research also concludes that there is a key element as to why aid may be more successful in some countries than in others. Kosack’s study found that aid is best received and has the most positive impact on the quality of life in countries where some semblance of democracy already exists and that in autocratic countries the quality of life is not helped and, worse, it is decreased. Therein lies the problem of how and why aid is in need of better policy and strategies for application. Those living under autocratic regimes have neither the education nor the capabilities to implement democratic policies and services to help themselves. Kosack argues that the countries that are not being helped are lacking in necessary structural components to facilitate such change. In order to help countries out of poverty and into better life quality, the people of these developing nations need to be socialized and educated as change occurs in order to help prop them up on proverbial legs that they will, with effective implementation, eventually learn to stand on their own in the global market.

Kosack, at the conclusion of his study on how effective foreign aid is, resolves that because there has been a renewed focus on the application of foreign aid, it is all the more important to study and discuss what measures are needed to promote sustainability in development for these nations long after the nations providing aid have left. Kosack closes saying, “in 2000, 189 countries committed themselves to cutting worldwide poverty in half, reducing child mortality by two-thirds, and ensuring universal primary education by 2015. Such ambitious goals may be achievable, but only if aid is carefully allocated and, in the case of autocracies, accompanied by efforts to promote democratization. To work, aid needs democracy” (Kosack, 2003). Without teaching the value of democratic ideology, its practice, and all its working parts, the developing nations that are receiving aid will not be able to self-perpetuate when a nation who has brought aid leaves. The process of aid needs to be one of not only providing help but one of slow instruction that helps to change these regimes, most especially autocratic regimes and helps them towards developing healthy democracies that last because of the communities they’ve been built in.

But this education cannot rest only on the shoulders of the people in these developing nations, they need reorganization and political shifts towards democracy in government as well. Paul Collier and David Dollar’s work, Can the World Cut Poverty in Half? How Policy Reform and Effective Aid Can Meet International Development Goals posits that foreign aid “can assist the government and the society to provide public services, including critical ones needed by poor households to participate in the market economy” (Collier & Dollar, 2001). These structures of democracy in both social and political contexts help to reinforce and empower the cycle of democracy. It allows people to empower themselves as politically engaged citizens in a system designed to seek their permission in policy, representation in legislation, and governance. But Collier and Dollar also note that “good policy increases the impact of aid; thus, the combination of good policy and aid produces especially good results in terms of growth and poverty reduction” (Collier & Dollar, 2001) because the two go together when aid is being supplied. Enacting good policy helps to ensure that those in power are not able to interfere with aid which helps make that aid all the more effective.

            The United States providing aid isn’t just necessary and needs to be increased, it needs to be built throughout and within the structures of the societies of developing nations. Aid is helpful in every way when it is given to more democratic nations. And because it is not helpful in autocratic nations, it is important to understand that this failure is a result of the distance between ideologies. Educating and helping provide the tools to aid the development of democracy in society and in politics. These re-workings of developing institutions along with the enactment of good policy facilitate aid and help to solidify the values and practices of democracy. Therefore, if the United States is to provide this badly needed aid, then they will have to change the paths and structures of application to have long-term effects.

Bibliography

 Collier, Paul, and David Dollar. "Can the World Cut Poverty in Half? How Policy Reform and Effective Aid Can Meet International Development Goals." World Development 29, no. 11 (2001): 1787-802. doi:10.1016/s0305-750x(01)00076-6.

Kosack, Stephen. "Effective Aid: How Democracy Allows Development Aid to Improve the Quality of Life." World Development 31, no. 1 (2003): 1-22. doi:10.1016/s0305-750x(02)00177-8.

Sachs, Jeffrey, and George B.N. Ayittey. "Poverty: Can Foreign Aid Reduce Poverty?" Controversies in Globalization: Contending Approaches to International Relations, 2012, 71-102. doi:10.4135/9781506335407.n3.