Two - A Better Way of Partnering: Supporting Country-led Efforts Against Hunger and Malnutrition

Sixty years of foreign aid has shown that donors alone—no matter how well-intentioned or generous—cannot end poverty and hunger. A poor country’s development depends on national leaders with vision and the will to follow through and gain the support and cooperation of their citizens.

A move toward country-led development began to occur in the late 1990s with the introduction of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). In exchange for debt relief from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), developing country governments were directed to develop their own poverty-reduction strategies. Uganda laid the groundwork for the PRSPs by initiating its own National Poverty Eradication Action Plan in 1996-97; the World Bank and IMF used it as a guide in formulating the PRSP process. The thought was that governments, by developing their own plans, would be more accountable for getting results from foreign assistance.

When President Obama stood with world leaders at the G-8 Summit in Italy to launch the L’Aquila Global Food Security Initiative, he emphasized that developing countries should have control over how the resources would be used. At a post-meeting press conference, he explained: “The purpose of aid must be…to help people become self-sufficient, provide for their families, and lift their standards of living. And that’s why I proposed a new approach to this issue—one endorsed by all the leaders here—a coordinated effort to support comprehensive plans created by the countries themselves, with help from multilateral institutions like the World Bank when appropriate.”

Feed the Future has the potential to be a major step forward in U.S. foreign assistance, but it is not the first effort to adopt a country-led development approach. The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a U.S. government agency, uses a country-led approach in its work with developing countries. The Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, usually called simply the Global Fund, is a multilateral donor with a unique approach to country-led development.

This chapter began by stating that donor assistance alone cannot end global poverty and hunger. But assistance can be a catalyst for sustainable progress. Long-term progress depends on the capacity of a partner country to build on the gains achieved with donor assistance, which is why capacity-building should be a priority for donors.

A country’s path to sustainable poverty reduction and economic development depends on all actors: civil society, the private sector, and government. Therefore, it is important for donors to consider capacity-building broadly, not as narrowly confined to government.

Many countries that receive foreign assistance face daunting challenges. They often lack the administrative capacity to address multiple and sometimes conflicting demands from various donor agencies. This is where donor coordination matters most. In 1960, the average number of donors working in a country that received aid was three; by 2006, the number had increased to 30. More donors are not a problem in and of themselves—but a lack of coordination is.

Presently, country-led approaches are the exception rather than the rule in U.S. development assistance. Early signs of progress under Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) compacts led the administration to incorporate a country-led approach into the plans for Feed the Future.

A global hunger crisis in 2007 and 2008, caused by a rapid rise in food prices, drove an additional 100 million people into hunger. The crisis illustrated some of the structural problems of foreign aid. Donors regularly attach conditions to aid, sometimes forcing policy changes in the recipient countries.

In 2002, African ministers of agriculture endorsed a development strategy known as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). African governments pledged to commit 10 percent of their national budgets to agriculture, a substantial increase over the 2-3 percent share that was the norm at the time.

The development challenges in a country like Haiti are enormous: the highest malnutrition rate in the Western Hemisphere, a third of newborn babies underweight, and an estimated 2.4 million chronically food-insecure people in a population of 9 million. These were the conditions in Haiti even before the devastating earthquake of January 10, 2010.