Celebrating 50 Years of USAID

On Friday, October 28, 2011, the Center for Strategic and International Studies hosted an event to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of USAID, the United States’ most prominent development agency. The event brought together four former administrators of USAID as well as the current administrator, Rajiv Shah, to discuss the agency’s accomplishments over the last 50 years, its current trajectory, and the issues that it will face in the future.

CSIS president and C.E.O. John Hamre opened the discussion by recalling the year 1962, the starting point for USAID. During the Cold War, the realization began to proliferate that the outcome of this conflict would not be decided by military action but rather through ideas. Innovation was necessary to demonstrate superiority, and the United States needed to act as a progressive world leader, especially in developing countries, to spread their innovations, and, subsequently, their political philosophy.

Daniel Runde, the co-director of the Project on U.S. Leadership in Development for CSIS, moderated the discussion, which featured Peter McPherson, Brian Atwood, Andrew Natasios, Henrietta Fore, and Shah.

Throughout the discussion, Shah emphasized his admiration of and appreciation for his predecessors, with whom he shared the stage. He noted that his administration would not have been able to achieve the results that they have without the extensive groundwork laid down by previous administrators. The beginning of the discussion focused on the many advancements made under the direction of the administrators in attendance, the most significant of which identified a need and strove to meet it in spite of the global atmosphere at the time. In particular, famine relief efforts in the 1980s, led by McPherson, in Ethiopia and Mozambique marked a defining moment in humanitarian efforts, with both countries representing Communist regimes. These relief efforts raised the question how to approach aid in the face of a fundamentally different system of governance.

As USAIS has matured, this question has been expanded to how to approach aid despite elementary differences in ways of life. Under Natsios, the answer lay in looking for overlap between the problems which developing countries faced—for example, combating food insecurity through improving the use of family planning. Fore built upon this principle by creating the Development Leadership Initiative, which seeks to establish a team of intellectual leaders focused on a results-based approach to international aid. Today, under Shah’s directorship, emphasis has been placed on empowering individuals—focusing less on a doctor or hospital’s ability to save a child’s life and instead putting the capability to do so into the mother’s hands—and thereby expanding the number of people that can be affected.

One of the major challenges facing the agency today is the issue of fragmentation. Although international development has risen on the agenda and the number of agencies involved in development work has increased substantially, this growth raises problems of how to coordinate all of these actors in the most efficient way possible. The administrators emphasized that any institution that has value to offer should be fully engaged and included. However, USAID should act a coordination point for all of these agencies, with approval necessary for any money spent. The event concluded with a discussion of the agency’s evolving relationship with the United States military and the need for a balance between security and development. As Shah reminded the audience, though, it is less expensive to do development work than to send soldiers, reinforcing the importance of USAID’s work over the past 50 years and their continued efforts to advance international development.

Colleen