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COVER STORY

USAID educational advisors in Pakistan hand a school uniform to a survivor of the October 2005 earthquake. The student is heading to school for the first time ever.

Three Paradoxes and the Need for Public-Private Partnerships

By Henrietta H. Fore
Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)

The work we do can be fraught with unexpected twists and unintended consequences. The longer you work in humanitarian assistance and development, the more striking some of its paradoxes become. I’d like to give you my thoughts on three of them.

The Paradox of Complexity

Here’s the first paradox. Assistance and development are focused on the simplest, most fundamental of human needs—having enough food, shelter, medicine, and the most basic human rights. And yet, the sheer complexity of delivering aid increases by the year.

The pace of change is only picking up. Capital, people, information, goods, and services cross borders like never before. So do security threats, disease, and unintended consequences. Just consider avian influenza, and how its implications for health, business, and development mutated and spread as virally as the disease itself.

The complexity of the issues we face now, on a truly global scale, is unprecedented. Food, energy, climate, technology, growth, wealth, and well-being—they’re all more interconnected than ever. So it must be true that the solutions we seek will be more interdependent than ever, and well beyond the reach of any single organization.

I believe this means that we must do business differently. I’d ask you to consider how we might resolve this paradox of growing complexity in assistance. It won’t be settled simply through structural changes, more funding, or new legislation.

No, I would submit that the key to easing complexity is knowledge. And the knowledge I consider most critical—in the global context in which we must all operate—is shared among the donors and contractors, agencies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), host governments, private sector interests, and foundations, all trying to make a difference. It is the knowledge of what works, of what is best practice, and of what delivers results.

We reduce complexity when we share that vital knowledge, transcend the partisan and parochial, and put outcomes first. I’ll give you some examples.

In Africa, we are working with public and private sector partners and African education leaders to launch an Education Commons [see sidebar]. USAID was one of the early supporters of an education portal that provides Zambian teachers with online in-service training, electronic library access, and peer-to-peer best practice sharing. This portal also connects Zambian Ministry of Education officials with their counterparts in the provinces and directly with teachers.

A boy in the village of Upper Mittikot in northern Pakistan carries the 20-liter containers USAID provided to help families store drinking water safely.

Our goal is simple: to help reinforce the government’s own strong commitment to universal primary education by 2015. But the partnership pursuing this goal is remarkable. It involves a range of in-country and international government agencies like UNESCO, leading private sector companies and foundations like Sun Microsystems and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and InterAction members like the International Reading Association and the Academy for Educational Development.

We see this portal as precisely the kind of technology that will become part of a larger Global Development Commons: a community of continuous and real-time information exchange, coordination, partnership, and action among public and private donors, agencies, NGOs, host governments, and civil society—all in constant collaboration. A Global Development Commons gives people in the developing world the tools they need to lead their own development.

Or consider the Higher Education Summit we hosted with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. We brought together leaders from technology companies like Intel and IBM, major philanthropic organizations, and college and university presidents from around the world to find paths for more innovative exchanges, teaching, research, technology transfer, and the business growth so critical to the developing world.

With the World Economic Forum, we’re hard at work on multinational partnerships in health, humanitarian assistance, water, energy and other critical areas, taking on partnerships created there that support our strategic priorities. We’ve also reached out to leading CEOs at companies that include Coca-Cola, Chevron, and McGraw-Hill to establish a CEO Public-Private Partnership Brain Trust—designed to engage and apply the very best minds in business.

These are just the kind of creative, nonpartisan, nonparochial efforts we need. They apply the unique abilities of every player—public, not-for-profit, NGO, and private—to deliver something none could manage alone or sustain for very long. These partnerships must always begin with the country, and the country’s development plan. We must all work with a singular vision that puts the country’s development first.

I believe this is how assistance and development will be done in the future. You already know that private sector capital flows are now a multiple of traditional foreign assistance. And you probably saw the news last week: Giving by foundations has set a new record, hitting almost $43 billion despite the stock market turbulence and the overall economy. To leverage that kind of capital and deliver lasting results, we simply have to learn to work together more effectively.

Band members from Islamabad’s Federal Government Model School for Girls welcome Administrator Fore to their school, where she launched a new $90 million USAID education project to improve education in Pakistan.

Last month in Afghanistan, at a donor coordination forum hosted by the Afghan government that included 33 donor countries, I was deeply impressed by the level of coordination being applied to restore that country’s physical and social infrastructure after decades of war—coordination among donor agencies, civil society, the military, and the private sector. There, I committed—on your behalf as well as mine—to raise the level of our game in joint decision-making. We will plan our efforts more consultatively with line ministries, implementers, and other donors.

In Islamabad, visiting an all-girls middle grade school, we launched a $90 million basic education program to improve teacher education and student learning environments throughout the country. USAID, partnering with the American Institutes for Research (AIR), the Aga Khan Foundation, and local NGOs, will help the government of Pakistan earn the trust and confidence of Pakistani parents that their children will receive a quality education—in this case, it is for girls in biology, chemistry, and physics.

In Uganda, I saw the vital work being done to reintegrate 1.8 million internally displaced persons after 22 years of conflict. This was in a multicultural context with Muslim leader Sheikh Musa Khalil, Anglican leader Bishop Ochola, the Acholi Paramount Chief’s Representative Michael Otim, and their government officials. This is a multicultural, multidenominational effort.

In the city of Goma in the Democratic Republic of the Congo we’re contributing to the security, development, and humanitarian work resulting from the Kivus Peace Conference. Here, I was proud to see the level of coordination of UN peacekeeping forces, municipal government, nonprofit organizations, and donor governments, all coordinating, synchronizing, and acting together.

In my meetings with top Palestinian business leaders, I was impressed by their entrepreneurial spirit and resilience. Despite daily business disruptions—protests, fighting, power outages, and restrictions on movement in and around Bethlehem—local artisans and restaurant and shop owners formed a trade association to promote tourism there for the holiday season. They are working toward regional trade in agriculture as well as world-class information technology projects. These are public-private partnerships.

And in Peru, I saw directly the tremendous potential of the local and international private sector to support development in some of the most impoverished regions of that country. NGOs, grantees, contractors, local government, universities, local companies, and the U.S. government were all deeply and effectively involved in reducing poverty and raising incomes above 50 cents or one dollar a day.

What unites our successful partnerships in all of these countries—and around the world—is a commitment to ensure that our investments in programs, in infrastructure, and in technical assistance are demand-driven; that they have full host country ownership; that they are fully responsive to and coordinated with community-level priorities; and that we are deeply engaged with you.

We have the tools and the knowledge we need. We understand more than we ever have before about the role of small enterprises in self-sustaining economic growth—and the way these enterprises allow the poor to generate wealth of their own creation. We are more sophisticated than ever about credit and financing, about regulatory oversight that supports rather than impedes business and civil society, about the role of women in education and entrepreneurship, about the importance of property rights, and about the basis for effective governance.

The knowledge is there. What we need to focus on is a higher order of knowledge sharing, coordination, and true partnership among the many players whose strengths must be brought to bear. That is the only way we will generate clarity of mission where it most matters—on the ground. It is the only way we will answer the paradox of complexity that so often impedes progress in development.

Now, on to a second paradox: the paradox of progress.

The Paradox of Progress

We’ve made progress in reducing poverty that is unprecedented in human history. This, in turn, has ushered in serious challenges that threaten the very progress we’ve made.

Greater prosperity is generating more demand for just about everything—most acutely in food, energy, transportation, and water.

Given the interplay of all of these global priorities—all of which are effectively non-negotiable—we now face a food crisis that looks more structural than cyclical. Today we face rising food prices in all grains—and growing concern. Productivity growth has not kept pace with population growth, and we have underinvested in agriculture in the past years.

A range of factors is contributing to rising food prices, including growing demand; increasing costs of production due to rising fuel prices; disappointing productivity growth in many developing countries; and various trade barriers, subsidies, and other counterproductive policies.

The President recognizes that we must address both the urgent and the important. As we respond to the immediate needs, we must also tackle the underlying structural causes of the crisis. Structural, systemic causes call for long-term strategies. Here’s what that means.

First, it means that, in addition to emergency aid, . . . by raising productivity, expanding local production, and lowering the cost of moving food from farms to tables, we will be attacking the root causes of the current crisis and reducing future vulnerability.

Burma service members form a line to carry water supplies off a C-130 at the Yangon International Airport in Rangoon. The plane delivered USAID water, food, and medical supplies to Burma after it was struck by Cyclone Nargi.

Second, it means redoubling efforts to conclude the Doha Development Round. The issues being addressed in World Trade Organization agriculture negotiations have a direct and significant bearing on the food price crisis. It is critical to achieve a quick result that reduces and eliminates import tariffs, export restrictions, other trade barriers, and market-distorting subsidies for food and agricultural goods.

Third, it means that we must remove barriers to the development and distribution of crops developed through advanced biotechnology. These technologies have the proven power to dramatically increase the productivity and incomes of the world’s poorest farmers in a safe and sustainable manner. We must bring the best science available to bear on solving age-old problems of pests and diseases. Corn and cotton can be protected from pests by biotechnology, increasing yields and quality and greatly reducing the use of pesticides. One of the current tragedies is that these technologies are being rapidly deployed in many advanced and middle-income countries, while many of the poorest still do not have access to them and to modern farming methods.

Last month, in Kansas City at the International Food Aid Conference, I met with the farmers, shippers, vendors, NGOs, and agencies responsible for nearly half of the global food aid delivered every year. We agreed that this food crisis really is different—that it will test our most fundamental assumptions, practices, and delivery systems—and that the landscape of food has changed. I asked them to consider how we can leverage the power and resources of private business, nonprofits, and government to build a pro-growth agenda that supports agriculture, trade, and market development.

Here is my challenge to you. Help us develop a comprehensive strategy and sustainable interventions for addressing the immediate and urgent dimensions of this food crisis—as well as the important systemic changes we need to make, to reach a sustainable balance and ensure human survival, peace, and stability.

We need your best thinking on this, and we need it now. As we continue to succeed in reducing poverty around the world, we have to be smart enough to stay ahead of the many demand curves that accompany prosperity. We cannot allow progress to make the poor victims of our own success.

And that brings me to the third and final paradox I’d ask you to consider: the paradox of performance.

The Paradox of Performance

This one concerns all of us—how we measure ourselves, and know when we are successful. The paradox is this: The interrelated global issues I’ve raised here demand that we operate as a coherent whole. And yet we are rewarded for excelling as individual organizations, with no common basis for project monitoring and assessment—no shared metrics and consistent measures to give us an accurate picture of our progress and performance in our many shared undertakings. No way to see what is most effective in the work we do together.

At USAID, we are taking a very serious look at the way we monitor and evaluate programs. Why is progress in reducing maternal mortality slower in Africa than in the rest of the developing world, even in countries poorer than those of Africa? How do we know that our interventions—in agriculture, human capacity building, and policy reform—are associated with specific outcomes? Do we have the basis to revise and amend programs, and change course where necessary—and funding flexible enough to do so?

We must be able to answer such questions clearly and unambiguously. We must follow the dollars relentlessly, find meaningful ways to measure the performance of our programs, and articulate that progress to the Washington policy community and to the American people, so that we can pursue the right priorities.

To help get the message out, we’ve started a Public Outreach working group at the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid to develop new ways to strengthen the American consensus for foreign assistance—and develop social marketing concepts that contribute to public awareness and support.

A common basis for monitoring and reporting our shared results will be pivotal to that group’s work. So I ask each of you to please give this some thought. I want to showcase our work together, to demonstrate to the American people that the nexus between development, diplomacy, and our national defense is real—in our national interest—and to demonstrate clear connections between input and outcome, initiative and result, programs and performance.

The Future

Now, just a few thoughts about our future together. We cannot face 21st-century challenges with 20th-century organizations. Progress against extreme poverty requires skills, experience, and resources that differ fundamentally from those we possess today.

From 1950 to 2004, the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty fell from 55 percent to 21 percent. But given our challenges in finance, fuel, and food, there is so much more to do. So I am pleased that we’ve been able to launch the largest request in history for an increase of the operating budget for USAID.

This Development Leadership Initiative will address critical shortages in programs and planning to support the kind of consultation and coordination I’ve been talking about today. It rebuilds our strength in executive and financial management; contracting; legal; health; economic growth and trade; alliance building; education; and democracy, conflict, human rights, and governance.

Finally, this Development Leadership Initiative is the basis for my confidence that the many foreign assistance reforms we’ve undertaken over the past year—and will continue to push this year—will have staying power, because they will have people behind them.

We’ve worked to shift the emphasis to the field by providing more opportunities for field leadership in the budget formulation and distribution processes. We have eliminated the Washington approval process for certain program and financial adjustments. And we are reducing the data required and the frequency with which Washington requests data from the field. I look to the day when we enter data once, and allow easy access to whatever information we need—when and where we need it.

We are all accountable for being a part of the solution, focusing less on defending specific regions, specific sectors, and specific programs, and more on reform priorities that meet the most critical needs at ground level.

Conclusion

Our work is a calling. There is no other way of putting it. One simply cannot know about what’s happening in the world right now and fail to act—the violence in Lebanon, the struggle for democracy in Zimbabwe, the massive disaster people are struggling with in Burma. I would like to extend my personal condolences to our colleagues in PACT who lost five staff in Cyclone Nargis. . . . At this hour, field workers for World Vision, PACT, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontieres, the American Red Cross, a USAID Disaster Assistance Response Team, and many, many more are responding—and upholding our commitment of service—as a community of conscience.

Three appeals to you, to resolve the three paradoxes of development that I’ve asked you to think about today.

First, help us ease complexity, through knowledge, coordination, and genuine partnership.

Second, help us develop a comprehensive strategy and sustainable interventions for addressing the growing expectations of the world’s poor—especially in the present food crisis—as well as the systemic changes we need to make.

And third, contribute your ideas for a common basis for project monitoring and assessment, so that we can meaningfully measure progress in our work together and help the Public Outreach working group strengthen the American constituency for foreign assistance.

Our success in ending extreme poverty is a matter of both heartfelt commitment and practical, clear-eyed pragmatism. It will take both. I am proud to work with you on what I believe is the greatest moral, intellectual, and practical challenge of our age.

USAID Administrator Fore’s commentary is edited from an address she gave at InterAction’s “New Visions to End Poverty” conference in Arlington, Va., on May 8, 2008. For more on InterAction, a private group of U.S.-based international NGOs, visit www.interaction.org.

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From the July/August 2008 issue of Serviam.