I need your ideas about the future of US Foreign Aid
Help bring the best ideas to an influential audience that's rethinking American foreign assistance
Long time, no see.
I’ll soon be in a room with people who have some influence on the future of US foreign assistance.
I’m asking for your ideas about what that future should be. Assume that USAID will close down and that American foreign assistance will be rethought.
What should we replace? What should we preserve?
I welcome your ideas, articles, links to books, whatever. If you prefer not to post them in a comment, email me at hello@zach.dev
Thank you!
Barring occasional emergencies, the ONLY aid any community needs is less meddling.
1) Restrict the expedient profiteering that keeps countries dependent (the distributed costs outweigh the concentrated profits).
(If you left it up to increasingly narrow capitalists, they'd recommend we all reduce the tremendous, redundant cost of 8 Billion independent "livers." Think how much metabolic overhead we'd "save" if everyone shared a dialysis machine once a week! Doh! They don't comprehend the concept of minimal configuration that still provides distributed resiliency. Less is more only until it isn't.)
2) Reduce the dependency (USA didn't need aid in 1776, it needed protection; ditto for all poor nations today)
3) Poor countries need better government. (See Singapore.) Barring occasional emergencies, if you provide anything else you are a co-dependent (on your own neighbors back home).
I think it'd be good at a meta level to implement measurement protocols in the future to ensure that we are measuring the impact of the aid we give to make sure it's actually accomplishing the goals set out and to focus our aid on a few key targets where there will be long term sustained impact and where a relationship is truly strategic (ex. DRC due to Cobalt holdings, Panama due to port access). Other than that I think focusing on projects that support key American industries (ex. robotics, nuclear) that we want to develop domestically and see as a key long term export that would also be net beneficial to the foreign country would be good. For example, X country in Sub-Saharan Africa experiences chronic brownouts from an ailing grid, making energy expensive and forcing citizens to constantly revert to expensive diesel generators. Under previous admins, I imagine there would be a few different types of projects like capacity building (e.g. sending U.S. experts to tell X country how to set up a grid), financing for local industry, and support for the development of renewables. Under the new regime, we would work backwards from demand signals we want to send to critical U.S. industries, like small modular nuclear reactors, and find projects that fit (as presumably there will be many more funding opportunities than dollars available to allocate) and fund those directly, leveraging American expertise and growing demand for key domestic exports.