U.S. NGOs Welcome New White House Vision for Development

A draft version of the Presidential Study Directive (PSD-7) [1], A New Way Forward on Global Development, was leaked to the media earlier this week. Developed by the National Security Council (NSC), the draft paper illustrates that the Obama administration is poised to take a major step forward on improving U.S. global development policy. It suggests needed reforms to improve the effectiveness of U.S. engagement in the developing world and involve non-state actors like NGOs, diaspora communities and the private sector in the process.

InterAction applauds many of the draft paper’s recommendations and would like to see them implemented as soon as possible. Prior to that, however, we would propose a serious dialogue among the Administration, Congress and civil society on how best to do that. Our thoughts on key points included in the paper are:

• InterAction has for a long time been calling for a national strategy for global development. This paper makes such a strategy a top priority and stipulates that it be updated every four years.
• By including the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator on the president’s National Security Council, the PSD paper fulfills another InterAction recommendation, and we believe it will greatly improve overall U.S foreign policy.
• The PSD paper’s call for enhanced partnership with non-state actors will enable the U.S. government to better leverage the large pool of private resources from the American public to increase the impact of limited publically-funded programs.
• While InterAction supports the paper’s emphasis on the importance of country ownership, this definition should be expanded from being described as a state-to-state transaction to a whole-of-society approach that includes consultation with local and international civil society.
• We agree that important policy and planning functions should be restored to USAID. However, the agency must have authority over the shaping of its own budget to be successful.

Overall, A New Way Forward on Global Development could be a major step toward establishing international development as a core pillar of U.S. foreign policy.

Read what the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network has to say about the paper [2].