President Obama delivers at the UN. Now he needs to deliver in Africa.

Sep 22nd, 2010 6:15 PM UTC
By Larry Nowels

As promised a year ago, President Obama came to the UN today with his plan to chart a new course for advancing sustainable, equitable economic growth and reducing poverty for the world’s poor. For the first time, the US now has a Global Development Policy that sets forward a clear sense of unified purpose, goals and a modern structure for US development programs. He also offered up some tough talk about mutual accountability and said that selectivity would be a new priority in determining how the United States invests and partners with countries and citizens in the developing world.

The President outlined four pillars of his new policy:

• Defining and measuring development: Raising people out of poverty and helping them on the path to more dignified and productive lives cannot be done solely through foreign aid. Trade, investment, and diplomacy are also essential elements that must be applied.
• Changing the goal of development: We shouldn’t just want to “manage” poverty but we should seek the means to take citizens around the world out of poverty.
• Prioritizing broad-based economic growth as an engine of sustainable development: Prosperity occurs more rapidly where governments attract private investment through friendly business environments, where corruption is not tolerated, where the rule of law and transparency are valued, and where governments are investing in the wellbeing of their own citizens, especially women.
• Mutual accountability: The path forward is a two-way street where donors, including the United States, are held responsible to deliver on their commitments and governments and the people of developing nations are ultimately accountable for their own success.

President Obama also talked about selectivity – focusing American efforts where we have good partners and a comparative advantage to achieve results. Excellent policy but very hard to execute. How policymakers work through this process of identifying the best partners and investments to scale them up, while jettisoning marginal or poor performing development activities will be something to watch. These will be tough choices, and establishing clear criteria that are faithful to the principles laid out in the new Global Development Policy will be critical. In other words, will hard-nosed, evidence-based policy decisions consistently win out over entrenched, parochial interests and short-term, strategically-driven imperatives?

All in all, we heard good words today from the President and he will be soundly applauded, as he should be. And next week we will hear more of this excellent language when five of the most key US foreign policy and national security leaders – the Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury, and the heads of USAID and the MCC – sit down to chat at the US Global Leadership Coalition conference. It could be a fascinating conversation about how ingrained institutional interests will be set aside to adapt to a common purpose for implementing the new Global Development Policy.

And there’s still at least one more piece of the policy architecture that will fall into place in the following month or so. The State Department/USAID’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review is nearing completion, a plan that will hopefully provide the operational blueprint for applying the principles set out by the President today.

TAGS: Barack Obama, Policy News, September 2010 MDG Summit