By Stan Soloway
Professional Services Council President and CEO
As the U.N. General Assembly gathers to measure progress toward the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, they can take pride in celebrating important accomplishments, but should also begin to consider what happens when many of those ambitious plans are not met. The global needle has moved in a positive direction to address global poverty, universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, HIV/AIDs, environmental sustainability and development partnerships, but U.N. officials have admitted that some goals in many places are already beyond reach. A weak global economy will get most of the blame, but how much money is spent does not alone account for the failure to meet key development targets. Policies on how international aid is delivered also need to be examined in light of new global realities.
Professional Services Council President and CEO
As the U.N. General Assembly gathers to measure progress toward the 2015 Millennium Development Goals, they can take pride in celebrating important accomplishments, but should also begin to consider what happens when many of those ambitious plans are not met. The global needle has moved in a positive direction to address global poverty, universal education, gender equality, child health, maternal health, HIV/AIDs, environmental sustainability and development partnerships, but U.N. officials have admitted that some goals in many places are already beyond reach. A weak global economy will get most of the blame, but how much money is spent does not alone account for the failure to meet key development targets. Policies on how international aid is delivered also need to be examined in light of new global realities.
One key policy debate deals with the role of the private sector in funding and delivering development assistance. Some decry the “privatization” of aid projects funded by foundations and corporations while others denounce the use of contractors from donor nations as high-cost colonialism. MDG gaps and failures will be offered as proof of insufficient “ownership” of aid projects and that only local buy-in, purchased through direct transfer of funds to recipient-nation governments and non-profits, guarantees development success.
These arguments overlook the vital role private sector donors and implementers already play in advancing developing nations from unproductive dependence to self-sustaining economic and governance capabilities. The Obama administration’s MDG strategy prudently looks to leverage innovation, deploy new technologies and introduce “new business models to make aid agencies and the international development architecture more effective.” That recognition that development is about doing business is a good first step toward a balanced, effective assistance strategy for the MDGs and beyond.
The moral imperatives that drive international humanitarian assistance need not, and in fact should not, operate to the exclusion of the practical considerations that lead richer countries to conclude it is in their self-interest to help poor countries develop into stable, free and open markets for global goods and services. In effect, foreign assistance exports our faith in the liberating and democratizing power of the marketplace to advance the human condition and universal human values. Aid detached from that reality loses popular support at home and is ineffective abroad.
Cutting U.S. private sector implementers out of aid projects in favor of direct assistance to recipient-country governments and organizations will not be the development panacea some promise. In many cases, developing countries simply do not yet have the indigenous capacity, or the political will, to tackle intractable barriers to growth. Take for example MDG No. 3, to promote gender equity and empower women. Improving the lives of women in the developing world not only contributes, but is essential, to the achievement of all the MDGs. Yet without an external push, current political and economic systems dominated by men are unlikely to cede arable ground, markets or power to women. U.S. companies and non-profits, funded by USAID, have drafted new laws on property ownership, conducted public education campaigns against sexual harassment, and reduced gender-based violence that kept girls out of school. Those programs, and many others just like them, using predominantly local personnel and organizations, achieved their program goals and left behind local capacity – trained and motivated women – to sustain the work.
Development is not a religion and its practice should not require a vow of capitalist celibacy. In the debate over the MDGs, the world cannot afford to indulge an anti-corporate philosophy that would withhold the capabilities, technologies and skills that the private sector can provide so effectively to those in desperate need.
