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- 02/18/12: Remarks by Nisha Biswal, Assistant Administrator, Asia Bureau, at the Harvard Project for Asian and International Relations Conference
- 02/15/12: Remarks by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State and Dr. Rajiv Shah, USAID Administrator at the USAID Town Hall Meeting - QDDR and USAID Forward
- 02/06/12: Remarks by Donald Steinberg, Deputy Administrator, US Agency for International Development - Beyond Victimhood: The Crucial Role of Marginalized Groups in Building Peace
- 02/02/12: Statement of Dr. Sarah E. Mendelson, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance, before the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, and Human Rights - U.S. Policy toward Post-Election Democratic Republic of the Congo
- 01/20/12: Remarks by USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah at the Environment and Security Conference, Washington, DC
- See all USAID Speeches and Testimony
 RSS Feed for Recent USAID Speeches and Testimony
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Remarks by USAID Administrator Dr. Rajiv Shah
U.S. Aid and Transparency for Global Development
Brookings Institution
Washington, DC
January 19, 2012
Good morning, and thank you, Noam, for that kind
introduction and for your important work here. I'm pleased to be able to join you today
and want to thank Brookings for all the great work that you've been doing in this space.
I also want to congratulate Brookings. I think recently you just won the
award again as being amongst the best or the best think-tank in the world, and I certainly
feel that way about many of the publications and ideas and initiatives that are housed
here that have such important impact on the way policymakers and others think about
what's achievable and what the standards of excellence should be that we try to achieve.
I'm also particularly grateful for Brookings because Ann Doyle, our
wonderful new public affairs and policy leader, is from here and now with us, and we're
so pleased to have Ann on board. So, we thank Brookings in a regular and consistent
way for that. (Laughter)
You know, you have a great panel here so I'm going to hopefully keep
this short. But, I do want to start by emphasizing this administration's commitment to
transparency in aid and in foreign assistance, but also in asking for your help. And, I'll
conclude with a few specific areas where I hope you as a community will continue to
push and continue to help push the thinking forward on what the standards ought to be
that we all try to achieve.
You know, on his first day in office President Obama issued a directive to
make federal government more efficient and more accessible. He ordered every federal
agency to develop an open government strategy outlining the steps we would take and
the new technologies we would use to fulfill a commitment to transparency that we have
made to the American taxpayer. This is a universal policy that affects USAID, the State
Department, but also all of the other federal agencies that engage in foreign engagement,
foreign assistance, and foreign development, which as you know is a broad pool of
partners.
Now, because this information is held in hundreds of different databases,
we sought to implement part of that pledge by creating foreignassistance.gov, a one-stop
dashboard that should over time allow anyone to go and see how the entire U.S.
government is approaching transparency in assistance. It's not an overnight fix, and I'll
talk through some of the challenges in a moment, but it is my aspiration and it is our
absolute commitment to keep improving, keep filling the holes, and keep expanding the
set of partners that are included in the foreignassistance.gov platform.
The President also launched the Open Government Partnership, a
multilateral initiative to ensure that countries sat together discussing their approaches to
open government and making similar commitments to both promote transparency and
fight the corruption that in so many places undermines the ability of governments to
function and build trust with their people.
And this year, at that meeting at the UN General Assembly, President
Obama announced that the United States would join the Extractive Industry's
Transparency Initiative, requiring oil, gas, and mining companies to disclose the
payments that foreign governments demand of them. Fighting the resource curse starts
with fighting rent-seeking, bribery, and graft in potentially lucrative contracts and markets.
By joining EITI and strengthening our own domestic resource reporting requirements,
we're fighting the corruption that has devastated so many potentially prosperous and
equitable societies.
And just two months ago at Bussan, Secretary Clinton announced we
would go above and beyond our open government partnership commitments by joining
on as a full member to the International Aid Transparency Initiative. Not just one agency,
not just one department, but the entire United States government is committed to full
membership in the IATI. This will be a challenging task. We're confident we can achieve
it, and we have the support of necessary internal partners, but this is going to stretch
what the U.S. government has done in the past in terms of making in particular multi-year
budget planning publicly accessible. But, we will achieve full membership.
We also seek to push ourselves beyond the traditional international
standards of achieving aid transparency. The reality is we live in a world where there's a
lot of documentation that's publicly available. Most of our grants are online. I dare you to
find them, but most of them are online. (Laughter) And, most other partner agencies can
say virtually the same thing around the world.
The truth is, as we've all learned from our own interface and use of
technology over the past several decades, simply having the information online is not
enough. Having it accessible, having it designed such that it can be utilized by the
broadest possible community to empower them to coordinate better, to come up with new
ideas, to conduct data analysis and research, to share new insights with the rest of the
world should be our aspiration.
And that's why we're currently in the process of piloting an effort to
geotag all of our projects and programs in selected countries. And if that is successful,
we would like to make that platform openly accessible, because I want anyone with an
Internet connection and the ability to download Google Maps to be able to get online and
scroll through the globe, identify projects and programs, drill down into them, and
understand not just what we're doing and what our partners might be doing, but also to
get a sense of other data that can be spatially overlaid on that context. Weather data,
soil quality data, information about climate and market trends.
In Paris and Accra, I think the United States was widely seen as, if we're
being honest, dragging our feet on transparency. Our goal going in to Bussan was to
lead, and of course when you get to a certain place after decades of continual process,
you can't flip the switch right away. But the commitments the President, the secretary,
myself and others in the development landscape in our government have made is
unwavering, and we will not only meet these international standards but we will, over
time, put forth some of these new tools like the geospatial mapping that will really
empower people in a fundamentally different way to play with data, connect with
development challenges, meet and be introduced to institutions that are conducting
projects and programs on the ground, and see the impact of that work.
Now, I hope you've heard of USAID Forward, because as you know I
don't go anywhere without talking about it. But USAID Forward is our effort to put forth a
package of operational reforms to help USAID institutionally become the best modern
development enterprise we can possibly be. We've focused our assistance where it
matters most; doubling our aid to Africa, closing a 40 percent staffing gap on the
continent, pushing our assistance into results-oriented initiatives, and meeting our
Gleneagles pledges. We've increased assistance in Africa, for example, from $980
million in 2001 to nearly $10 billion today.
And, we've tried to approach that work in a manner that is accountable
for concrete results. Instead of paying contractors to evaluate their own projects, we've
defined a new evaluation policy and strategy that we hope is quickly becoming a gold
standard. We've sought resources from Brookings and other institutions in town and
around the world to help us implement that policy, so that programs from the beginning
have baseline data that's collected. There are counterfactuals built in to program design.
Data reporting is required on an outcomes basis, not a process basis, and we are
committed to making sure that every program within three months of its completion has
an evaluation that's publicly available.
By the end of this year, we think we'll be able to publish more than 200
such evaluations just by looking at the backlog of evaluation data that has existed that
hasn't been made publicly accessible in an easy-to-use manner, and our commitment
goes beyond that. We're committed to not rewriting the evaluations, or even evaluating
the evaluations before we make them public. We want an automated system that allows
independent evaluators to put data and information online so that we, all of you, and so
many others around the world and in this community can learn together and get better at
carrying out our incredibly meaningful human mission.
And finally, we're committed to a dramatic set of procurement reforms.
Now, I don't know if you think of procurement reform as absolutely required in order to
achieve aid transparency, but I want to argue that it is and I'd like to argue that the United
States over the last several decades and our European counterparts in the same
timeframe -- although we've gone in different directions in terms of how we provide
assistance, we've both veered off course in terms of using our resources to build the kind
of local institutions and local capacity that create the genuine conditions for exit over
time.
The goal of our work, as President Obama said in the policy directive on
development, shouldn't be to continue to support contractors and implementing partners
to serve those who are least fortunate. The goal of the work should be to build the
institutions, the private sector, and civil society required to allow aid to come to an end.
And in that context just weeks ago we eliminated a series of what I
consider painful regulations that required our staff to seek waivers every time they
wanted to buy goods in country. That means if you're in a country that drives on the left
side of the road, you now don't need to wait months for a waiver just to buy the right type
of vehicle and use that in a program or project.
Most critically -- and I would add that that's part of an effort to untie as
much of our assistance as possible. Between 2005 and 2009 the level of untied aid has
gone from 32 percent to 68 percent with the U.S. government. Now, I believe the
international average is somewhere in the 70 percents and as people keep moving
forward I'm convinced the United States will essentially catch up to the international
norm. But, I'd also argue that the traditional definition of untied aid, of not necessarily
specifying the types of institutions or where they come from that ought to be part of the
implementation process for programs and policies, may not be the optimal definition of
excellence and development. If we're really focused on building local institutions we
should actually think about how you create mechanisms that allow governments, donors,
multilateral partners to invest directly in those local institutions and to do that in a manner
that helps them build capacity over time. Not by flying consultants in to teach capacity
building. I don't know that the track record of that approach has necessarily been strong.
But rather, by doing what every other institution in the private sector
around the world does. Building capacity by investing capital and trying to get things
done, and in that context our procurement reform is designed fundamentally to build the
type of local capacity that creates the conditions for the end of aid.
Rather than subcontract with the same Ethiopian NGO for 12 years
because our regulations were too burdensome, we changed our regulations and now
work with them and invest in them directly. Rather than renew billion-dollar-plus
contracts that are difficult to manage and difficult to have visibility on, we've created a
review board that essentially breaks them down into smaller, more manageable pieces,
pieces that can be more transparent and more efficient.
Rather than pay beltway firms to provide vaccines in Liberia, we're
shifting global health spending directly to the health ministry there, saving us $1 million
while in a transparent way building institutions of state that will allow the Liberian
government to take on its own responsibilities to provide public health services to its
children.
By 2015, 30 percent of our overall assistance will be shifted directly and
accountably to its local institutions. Those local institutions, whether they are African
agricultural capital in East Africa working with JP Morgan and USAID's DCA program, or
the Afghan Ministry of Health will continue to need services and support and consultation
with the traditional partners that implement programs. But giving them the authority to
seek and purchase the services that they believe they need and holding them
accountable for achieving results and managing and insisting upon clean and transparent
financial management systems -- not just in our traditional implementing partners but in
those local institutions -- that's what aid transparency should be about, that's what
building local capacity should be about, and that's what creating institutions that
genuinely put us out of business over time should be all about.
Now, this is controversial. Some people don't think of this as untied aid,
some worry that the resources are put at risk. I can assure you that our team, through its
decades of history with host country contracting and deep, local engagement has
developed very sophisticated tools that allow us to measure, track, and monitor
resources no matter who our ultimate recipients are. I can also assure you that we have
more transparency and more oversight in these direct assistance relationships than we
do when we funnel the money through subcontracted systems and we lose insight on
reporting and transparency at different levels of subcontracting.
Now, this may all sound too technical for a high-minded conversation
about IATI and websites and dashboards, but I'm telling you if we as a community are
going to survive another 50 years and if we're going to achieve the goals we want to
achieve, and if we're going to build the kind of capacity that we can be proud of as
leaving institutional legacy because of the partnership of the American people, we have
to pursue these reforms aggressively. We are pleased that we've gotten support for this
reform agenda from both sides of the aisle, and we will be vigilant about protecting
American taxpayer dollars and absolutely insisting on results inclusive of the results of
building local institutions that stand the test of time.
So, I would ask for your help, in conclusion, in a few specific areas.
First, you should continue to push as loudly and aggressively as you can on aid
transparency. I know that there are holes in the foreignassistance.gov website. I know
that when you look at the aid report, you know, some of that's a little bit dated because it
gives us an "X" for ITI or an "X" for some of the things that we've done, and you should
track and make sure that we live up to these commitments.
I also know that now that I'm exposed to the depths of federal budgeting
systems and data management systems, that these changes -- and you should not
expect these changes to take place over time. But if you as a community stay focused
on the right goals and if you stay committed to ensuring people live up to them, and if you
hold other international partners to similarly high standards about can people report on
results? Are we building local institutions? Are we creating space for the private sector?
And, are we genuinely investing directly and respectfully with those we're trying to help?
I'm convinced our field of development can reform itself, and in reforming
itself we can achieve some tremendous goals. We're on the verge of being able to
eliminate or create a generation without AIDS. We're on the verge of being able to see
the endpoint in preventable child death. We now have the tools to end non-conflictrelated
famine and hunger in our lifetimes. We have the capacity to ensure that every
child on the planet has a curriculum in their hand and the ability to read, and testing
systems and educational systems that at very low cost generate incredible outcomes.
As I look around this room, I see many of you that have pioneered efforts
in all of these areas. So, keep doing that. But in order to really achieve success, those
of you that focus on transparency, focus on local capacity building are going to develop
the next construct for what untied aid should really mean.
I hope you will be energized to continue your work, to do it with visibility,
to insist on outcomes, and to hold everyone -- including the United States -- to a high
standard of accountability.
Thank you. (Applause)
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