By Lawrence J. Halloran
Director of PSC's International Development Initiative
The Washington Post’s "Political Bookworm," Steven Levingston, should have burrowed a bit deeper before he published the Sept. 2 commentary by Rachel McCleary, a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
In her guest blog, McCleary claims U.S. humanitarian aid should be “reclaimed” from the pernicious influences of for-profit development firms. She argues that non-profit private voluntary organizations should deliver the bulk of U.S. development assistance because they are apolitical, impartial and transnational, “that is, not identified with national ideologies or driven by short-term policy agendas.” But she offers no proof to suggest for-profit firms are the opposite.
Nor does she address the more pertinent issue of performance. Nowhere in her piece does she argue that non-profits are more effective or cheaper at completing development projects than tax-paying U.S. development firms. In effect, McCleary demands a needless, ultimately counterproductive, choice between aid delivery actors based on a misreading of the facts and a misunderstanding of how indispensible both U.S. companies and non-profits are to achieving humanitarian and development goals under the most difficult conditions on earth. Her post is replete with inaccuracies and irrelevancies, like where an organization is headquartered and its headquarter's proximity to Congress, rather than where it does the work and what the work achieves.
To support the need to solve “a longstanding problem with the dispersal of American assistance,” McCleary cites the growth of USAID annual obligations to for-profit companies from 38 percent in 2004 to 51 percent in 2005. She neglects to point out that trend is not sustained, but a reflection of extraordinary USAID activity in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2008, the share of USAID funds obligated through contracts to companies had returned to pre-war levels near 40 percent.
That split between non-profit organizations and U.S. development firms allows USAID to use all the funding tools available to accomplish tough development projects in underdeveloped parts of the world. For all the good work they do, non-profit organizations would be the first to admit they cannot build electrical distribution grids, build roads, or provide the highly technical skills and advice offered by U.S. companies in critical areas like gender equity and maternal health.
As for private voluntary organizations being apolitical, their extensive and visible congressional advocacy and grassroots activities argue otherwise. As for their being impartial, the fact that U.S. companies undertake projects based on USAID requirements does not make those firms’ activities any less focused on needs. And when it comes to being transnational, it is any non-profit’s right, of course, to operate outside U.S. policy interests and goals. But in the discussion of how U.S. aid is delivered, it is good to remember the only logo a U.S. company can put on a USAID project says “From the American people.”
