Porter.McConnell_Oxfam

Oxfam America’s Porter McConnell with her take on President Obama’s speech today:

President Obama knocked it out of the park in his address to the UN MDG Summit this afternoon. We asked for a “barn burner of a speech”, and boy did we get one.

Some excerpts:

“So let’s put to rest the old myth that development is mere charity that does not serve our interests. And let’s reject the cynicism that says certain countries are condemned to perpetual poverty.

“We also recognize that the old ways will not suffice…After all, no country wants to be dependent on another. No proud leader in this room wants to ask for aid. And no family wants to be beholden to the assistance of others.

“Put simply, the United States is changing the way we do business.

“For too long, we’ve measured our efforts by the dollars we spent and the food and medicines we delivered. But aid alone is not development.

“Consider the millions of people who have relied on food assistance for decades. That’s not development, that’s dependence, and it’s a cycle we need to break. Instead of just managing poverty, we have to offer nations and peoples a path out of poverty.

“So we will seek partners who want to build their own capacity to provide for their people.

“Because the days when your development was dictated in foreign capitals must come to an end.

And this can be our plan—not simply for meeting our Millennium Development Goals, but for exceeding them, and then sustaining them for generations to come.”

Some concrete actions to match those words, from the policy released today:

• A new policy for how we spend our foreign aid dollars: “Today, the President signed a Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development, the first of its kind by a U.S. administration. The directive recognizes that development is vital to U.S. national security and is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative for the United States.”
• A way to make deliberate choices: “Formulate a U.S. Global Development Strategy for approval by the President every four years.”
• Country ownership: “Place greater emphasis on building sustainable capacity in the public sectors of our partners and at their national and community levels to provide basic services over the long-term.”
• Coordination among agencies, led by National Security Council: “Establish an Interagency Policy Committee on Global Development, led by the National Security Staff and reporting to the NSC Deputies and Principals, to set priorities, facilitate decision-making where agency positions diverge, and coordinate development policy across the executive branch, including the implementation of this PPD.”
• A new partnership with Congress: “In forging this new partnership, we will seek greater flexibilities, including a reduction in earmarks and the ability to reallocate funding from less to more effective programs, while committing departments and agencies to a much higher standard of accountability for results.”
• A seat for development at the table: “To ensure that development expertise is brought to bear in decision making, the Administrator of USAID will be included in meetings of the National Security Council, as appropriate.” [Next step will be to make this permanent.]

Tomorrow, we will hold the president accountable for delivering on his words today. But tonight, we’re joining our friends and colleagues around the world to celebrate.

-Porter McConnell, Aid Effectiveness Team, Oxfam America

Porter McConnell of Oxfam America previews President Obama’s speech tomorrow:

This week, world leaders are meeting in New York to plot a path to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. President Obama is giving a speech at the summit on Wednesday. The question is, will this be just another speech, or will this be the speech of a lifetime?

The Administration first released its plan for the US role in meeting the MDGs in July. This plan is a step in the right direction, but one billion poor people are counting on us to turn those words into action. The President will need to confront some tough choices. It’s time for the American people to hold him accountable for concrete actions to help people around the world beat poverty once and for all.

Thankfully, the US isn’t in this alone: President Obama needs to call on other world leaders to make their own robust plans, and their citizens need to hold them to it. But after world leaders have all packed their bags and returned home, the real work begins. The only way to turn the corner on the MDGs is for the Administration to undertake tough reforms to make our aid work for poor people.

The Administration has made a start: country ownership is at the heart of the Global Health Initiative, Feed the Future, and USAID’s Implementation & Procurement Reform. But to take country ownership from lip service to reality, the Administration and Congress must fix the tangled web of competing agendas that undermine ownership at every turn. That means an overhaul of our Cold-War era foreign assistance legislation, and a seat for USAID on the National Security Council, so our efforts to fight global poverty aren’t diverted to serve narrow diplomatic and security ends. As Ethiopian Minister of Health and Global Fund Chair Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus remarked to policymakers this summer, “People say country ownership is confusing. It’s not confusing, it’s actually really clear. What’s missing is the commitment to implement it.”

We must send the message to President Obama that now is not a moment for a symbolic speech, now is the time for urgent action. If the global economic crisis has taught us anything, it’s that global poverty is a fundamental threat to our shared efforts to build a secure, prosperous and just world. Together we must beat global poverty, and the only way we do that is by recognizing that poor people themselves are critical to the solution.

-Porter McConnell, Aid Effectiveness Team, Oxfam America