The Portfolio Model of Foreign Assistance (Foreign Affairs)

From the op-ed:

By Alicia Phillips Mandaville, Vice President for Global Development at InterAction, and Senior Associate with the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She was formerly Chief Strategy Officer for the Millennium Challenge Corporation.

In the first half of this year, U.S. President Donald Trump [1]’s administration began to call for reform of the various agencies, offices, and programs that provide U.S. foreign assistance. In response, the foreign policy community produced several structural bureaucratic proposals. Organizations such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies [2], the Center for Global Development [3], and the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network [4], as well as coalitions like InterAction [5] and the Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid [6]all made various recommendations, ranging from the immediate incremental step of a multilateral foreign assistance review to a fundamental redesign that would integrate all smaller agencies into a single US global development structure.

If the United States wants to maximize the value of its foreign aid [7], it needs a fresh paradigm that supports the purpose of foreign assistance, acknowledges the aspects of international aid that it can alter through structural change, and acknowledges that there are global or market forces that remain beyond Washington’s control.

Read full op-ed here.