On the eve of an ever more likely government shutdown, Raj Shah reminds us of the millions of people around the world who count on the support and assistance of the US government.

In his first 2011 Annual Letter released last week, the USAID Administrator reflects on the many accomplishments and advancements in US foreign assistance over the past year. From innovative relief efforts in Haiti, to election assistance in Sudan, to development assistance in Afghanistan and Pakistan, USAID is working along with the State Department and the military to help ensure the safety and security of citizens. Additionally, US investments in key initiatives such as Feed the Future and the Global Health Initiative are fighting hunger and deadly diseases, and giving people a chance to lead healthy, prosperous lives. And all of this for less than 1 percent of the entire US budget!

For those who may be skeptical of what foreign assistance can achieve, Shah highlights some of the outstanding successes in global development over the past decades:

In order to keep delivering on these important successes and ensure that every dollar of our foreign assistance goes further, the US has introduced a number of advancements to USAID and global development efforts. Beginning in September when President Obama laid out the US global development policy at the United Nations, USAID followed by introducing key reform efforts in the way it does business, including new models for partnership, a greater focus on development results and monitoring impact, greater transparency efforts like the foreign assistance dashboard, and a spotlight on innovation and science and technology to achieve new gains and efficiencies in development.

But despite all of the accomplishments over the past year, and the decades of progress that have come before, future advancements in development are threatened by diminishing resources. Congress is currently debating funding for the remainder of FY11 that could cut between 10 to 40 percent from critical programs that help the poorest countries. And a new budget resolution from House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan for FY12 would cut as much as 27 percent from the total US international affairs budget (and if you don’t include foreign assistance for frontline states like Afghanistan and Pakistan, the cuts are as much as 37 percent!).

While cuts like these may only reduce the budget deficit by a mere percentage point, they would have devastating consequences to those who depend on life-saving antiretroviral treatments for AIDS, insecticide treated bednets, and immunizations against preventable diseases. At a recent House Appropriations State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee, Raj Shah told committee members that cuts in the bill passed by the House for FY11 could result in the deaths of 70,000 children in developing countries, a “conservative” estimate in his words. So while Congress faces difficult decisions to rein in spending and control the budget, we must also face the difficult consequences that would arise from cuts in the critical 1 percent of our budget.

To read more about the progress we’ve made, check out these incredible videos and stories on ONE’s Living Proof website.

Photo courtesy of USAID.

Earlier today, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) released preliminary data for donor spending in 2010. ONE’s analysis of the new data (which focuses on sub-Saharan Africa and excludes bilateral debt relief) reveals that donors increased development assistance to sub-Saharan Africa by 12 percent in 2010, a sizable boost considering that global development assistance increased by only 7 percent.

All G8 members (excluding Russia, which does not report to the DAC) increased their spending in 2010, with large increases coming from France, Japan and the UK and smaller boosts from Canada and Italy.

Historic increases in development assistance have supported incredible progress in the world’s poorest countries over the past decade (a message that Bill and Melinda Gates are sharing across European capitals this week as part of ONE’s Living Proof Campaign). However, early indications suggest that increases from most donors will not be enough to meet the targets they set in 2005 to achieve by 2010.

ONE will be releasing its final assessment of the 2005 commitments in our annual DATA Report before the G8 Summit in France. This year’s report will also assess donors’ efforts to improve the effectiveness of their aid and leverage additional resources through innovative financing mechanisms. In the current economic climate, a focus on impact and innovation are critical to ensuring that every dollar of development assistance is maximized. The 2011 DATA Report will also examine development assistance commitments beyond 2010 and the role of new donors like Brazil, India and China, who are not members of the DAC but are becoming increasingly important partners for Africa.

See ONE’s full analysis of the new DAC data here and read more about individual donors’ performance:

Here’s a question that 63 percent of Americans can’t answer: How much of our government spending goes toward foreign aid? The answer: less than 1 percent.

According to a recent poll, Americans believe that the government spends more on defense and foreign aid than it does on Medicare and Social Security. In fact, Americans think that we spend an average of 27 percent on foreign aid — that’s more than what we spend on our military budget. And don’t even talk to me about GDP. Our GDP ranks No. 1, yet in 2009, we ranked in seventh place for aid funding.

It angers me that Congress is targeting foreign aid spending (of all things) for major cuts this year. That 1 percent funds important programs that save lives and advocate peace, stability and security beyond our borders. Even though it makes up a tiny percentage of our budget, we’ve been able to maximize that funding and put it toward effective programs like USAID, PEPFAR and the Global Fund that are helping to make a real difference in fighting extreme poverty and preventable disease.

Yet there have been proposals to bring down the bill that funds US diplomacy and assistance to poor countries by 17 percent from FY2010 amounts, including a 30 percent cut to development assistance from last year’s amount, a $450 million cut to the Global Fund and a 41 percent cut to humanitarian aid for disaster relief.

Let me translate these figures into human lives for you. If the Global Fund loses its funding, up to 58,286 HIV-positive pregnant women will not receive treatments to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. About 6 million treatments for malaria will not be administered. 372,000 testing and treatments for tuberculosis will be halted. And 414,000 people living with HIV/AIDS will not be provided the antiretroviral medication they need to survive. As you can see, this is truly a matter of life and death.

But here’s the thing — you can do something about this right this very moment. Tell your senator to SAY NO to the budget cuts. We know Congress faces tough choices on the budget, but these cuts fall hardest on the people who can least afford them. Join more than 95,000 ONE members and sign our petition.

The UN Foundation, in partnership with the World Bank, the Brookings Institution, the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) and the Standard Bank recently hosted a panel on the role of innovative financing and the global health funding gap.

Innovative financing plays a critical role in promoting efficiencies in investments and addressing funding gaps for foreign assistance, which is more important than ever given the challenging fiscal climate. Keynote speaker Amie Batson, Deputy Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID, said “innovative finance, alongside advances in research, clinical practice and social marketing, is crucial in our efforts to reach ambitious global health goals in a resource-constrained environment.”

At the event, the UN Foundation unveiled the Pledge Guarantee for Health (PGH), a new financial tool to help expedite the disbursement of foreign assistance while making global health supplies more affordable for developing countries. PGH provides short-term loans to developing country recipients on the basis of pending aid commitments, which in turn helps countries avoid high costs that can arise while they are waiting for funding to replenish supplies of life-saving medications. Through the first PGH-facilitated deal, more than 800,000 anti-malaria bed nets were delivered and distributed in Zambia three months ahead of schedule and before the deadly rainy season. Throughout the year, we look forward to tracking the progress of this new financing mechanism and the life-saving impact it will have.

After the event, I had the opportunity to speak with Joy Phumaphi, executive secretary of the African Leaders Malaria Alliance, about global health challenges and existing financing mechanisms to address these problems such as the Global Fund and GAVI. Joy shared with me her support for the Global Fund and GAVI and encouraged ONE members to continue fighting on behalf of the world’s poor.

Here’s what she said:

“The Global Fund is the biggest single donor of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in the developing world. And it is not just the biggest funder but it is also a development tool that has created ownership of the fight against malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS. That mechanism has effectively brought together stakeholders in a way that no other mechanism has ever been able to do in global development. This is a huge contribution to development… the contribution the Global Fund has made to global health is comparable to none…. Investments are more critical now than ever because it is not only a question of losing potential gains in the future but it is a question of losing the investments that we’ve made and we can’t afford to do that.”

Over the past 10 days, we have been absorbing and reacting to developments around not just one, but two budgets that significantly effect global poverty reduction programs. After looking at both, however, you might conclude that they were headed in opposite directions, having far-reaching, but far different impacts on the lives of the world’s poor. And you would be correct.

Last week, the House debated an appropriations measure that would finalize US spending for FY2011 -– that’s this year, nearly half of which has gone by. As approved, the House bill cuts the International Affairs budget by 19 percent from FY2010 amounts with serious consequences for poverty programs. Resources for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are slashed by $450 million and global development assistance is cut 30 percent below last year’s amount, placing the administration’s Feed the Future Initiative in great jeopardy.

Humanitarian aid supporting victims of emergencies and disasters around the world shrink by over 41 percent with food assistance falling to levels of a decade ago. For the Bush Administration’s signature program, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the $790 million appropriation is 29 percent below last year and the smallest budget the MCC has ever received.

In contrast, President Obama submitted his FY2012 budget to Congress on February 14, proposing a modest, but strategically targeted request for International Affairs next year. While the proposal represents a small 3 percent increase over FY2010 levels and provides substantial increases for operations and aid to the front line states of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, it also recommends important increases for poverty-focused activities and maintains US commitments support global challenges facing all nations. American support for the Global Fund would grow by 24 percent, the Global Health Initiative would increase by 11 percent, and resources for Feed the Future would put the initiative back on track.

Attention on the FY2011 budget now shifts to the Senate, which needs to take some action prior to the March 4 expiration of the existing continuing resolution (CR). Prospects are high for some sort of short term extension of the CR and the debate will continue. In the meantime, the President’s FY2012 request will take a back seat to these efforts to finalize FY2011 spending and to restore the crippling cuts to global poverty programs passed by the House. Look for frequent updates on the “Tale of two budgets.”

Sister Suzan with Erin Hohlfelder

I feel so lucky to travel around sub-Saharan Africa with ONE, because I get to come face-to-face with the people who are recipients, distributors and designers of development programs. I flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, last Tuesday with a few of my colleagues, and my time here so far has yet again allowed me to meet up with some really impressive people who have devoted parts (or all) of their lives to making their country a more healthy, stable and just place.

Take Sister Suzan, the head of the antenatal clinic at Chris Hani Baragwanath “Bara” Hospital on the outskirts of the Soweto slum. She’s worked at Bara for 35 years — through apartheid, through the emergence of the HIV pandemic, through the previous government’s refusal to allow antiretroviral treatment for AIDS, and (most notably of late) through major progress.

When AIDS first hit Soweto, mothers who were pregnant couldn’t get drugs to prevent the spread of HIV to their babies or to protect themselves. In the early 2000s, a single dose of treatment (nevirapine) was available for the babies, but mothers struggled to access treatment early enough to stay healthy, and as many as 50 percent of babies were still born HIV-positive. Now, all mothers who come to Bara can receive treatment and counseling services from Sister Suzan and her staff, and rates of mother-to-child transmission of HIV have been reduced to less than 5 percent across Soweto.

Or, take the staff of Grassroot Soccer (GRS), a motley and energetic crew of both South Africans and Americans on year-long internships. GRS taps into the energy of thousands of children ages 10 to 19 who aspire to be star athletes and teaches them the life skills they’ll need to prevent the spread of HIV and to feel empowered along the way. When we weren’t kicking around soccer balls on the field, we heard impressive testimonies from the staff members — many of who became emotional when describing their commitment to the work they did on a daily basis, often having seen the devastating impact of HIV in their communities and families firsthand.

There are not enough blog posts to profile all of the Sister Suzans here. In less than a week, we’ve met up with health experts, brave AIDS activists, innovative thinkers — and they all have a lot of great advice for ONE on how we can be smarter advocates. Each of these people has one other thing in common — they are working on development projects that have benefited from US foreign assistance.

In fact, the message we’ve heard over and over is that US funding for programs like PEPFAR and the Global Fund helped to lay the groundwork for massive scale up of health efforts and a more sustainable path for the South African government to adopt a majority of the responsibility for health services themselves (another ONE colleague in Jo’burg, Josh Lozman, will have more on that in a later blog post).

So, it was with great anxiety that we received news this week that the House Appropriators had submitted massive cuts to the international affairs budget.

Like the catchy words used by the development community, budget cuts are often abstractions that disguise the true negative impact they make. It’s hard to conceptualize what less money means when it’s just a series of numbers (can you really tell the difference between $200 million and $190 million on paper?).

But this week has reminded me that when we think budget cuts, we should think about what it means for Sister Suzan’s ability to ensure that all mothers can prevent their babies from being born with HIV. We should think about what it means for the jobs of South Africans and Americans alike, working at GRS to ensure that the next generation of kids can have lower rates of HIV and higher rates of education and skills. We should think about what it means for the civil society groups and doctors who are doing selfless work every day to make sure people don’t have to suffer from diseases that aren’t even a nuisance in the western world. Because Americans have been generous and bold with our foreign aid investments, and our partners in the developing world can’t afford for us to hide behind the abstractions in this critical moment.

The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)—which is a coalition of donor countries and multilateral organizations, recipient countries, and civil society organizations—aims to improve and increase transparent reporting on aid flows and activities. At present, individual donors largely decide themselves what and how much information they want to make public regarding money they spend on international development. What they do publish isn’t always easily comparable to what other donors make available, and that makes it very difficult to track aid flows at the international level, or even within specific recipient countries. With IATI’s help, and with the new standard developed by their steering committee on Wednesday, more and more donors will be encouraged to publish their information in a common format on their registry.

At ONE’s sister organization, Publish What You Fund, Director Karin Christiansen has been working with IATI to push for greater transparency among donors in the international system. Following the developments, she noted:

“For the first time, a standard exists which means more aid information will actually be better aid information. And that is what we need to make aid transparent; not only to other governments, and aid agencies, but to the public in all of our countries too.”

Not only will governments be more accountable to their citizens and those they are helping in developing countries, but they will also be better able to coordinate their giving with other governments, which can lead to better planning, more efficient use of resources, and the opportunity to make a bigger impact.

So while IATI has done the hard work of laying the foundation, the even harder job remains still in getting donor governments to sign on to the initiative, publish their information in the registry, or at the very least adhere to the common principles of making aid information more public and in a more timely fashion. Currently there are 18 donors who have signed on to the IATI Accra Statement and are committed to its principles, and the UK Department for International Development (which is also part of IATI’s Secretariat) is the first donor to publish its information in the registry. Numerous recipient countries have also come out in support of the initiative. But for it to really be effective, IATI needs to garner much broader cooperation from the donor community. Only 3 of the G8 members have signed on (in fact, countries like Italy and Japan that are not part of IATI have ranked as some of the worst countries in terms of transparency), not to mention the tens of other large bilateral donors, multilateral donors, and emerging donors who have also yet to agree to the standards. The United States (who spends the biggest amount of money on foreign aid) has not formally signed on to IATI’s statement; although they have moved towards greater adherence to transparency principles, such as the recent release of the new USAID dashboard that publishes US foreign assistance flows in an accessible format.

When governments are more transparent, everyone wins. So let’s keep encouraging our governments to be more forthcoming with how our taxes are being spent so we can hold them accountable for investments they are making to help those in developing countries. Making this information available can also help the citizens of developing countries know how much their governments are receiving and so they can push for it to be spent it in ways that really meet their needs.

Rep. Nita Lowey of New York, the ranking Democrat on the State and Foreign Operations Appropriations subcommittee, wrote in a recent Politico column:

“Leaders of both parties, including President George W. Bush, have affirmed that U.S. power is a three-legged stool of military might, diplomatic skill and development. The foreign aid bill’s diplomatic and development objectives pay dividends by helping avoid military deployments to protect U.S. interests, which are far more costly in both life and treasure.”

And GOP strategist John Feehery said in the Hill:

“…Cutting foreign aid is not going to balance the budget. It is only going to lessen our influence in the rest of the world. I am all for putting pressure on our foreign assistance programs to make sure we are getting the best bang for the buck. I am not for taking us out of the foreign assistance game entirely, though. Isolationism is not going to make America more secure.”

Using less than one percent of the United States budget we have helped save millions of lives through basic childhood vaccinations, malaria prevention and treatment, and HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. It is now possible that, by 2015, no child will be born with HIV. This was unimaginable even 5 years ago. In 2010, 98 million fewer people went hungry compared to 2009, due in part because of our support of agricultural development. Millions more children are in school. More moms are living through childbirth. Since 1990, some 400 million people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. This is living proof American generosity makes a world of difference.

Cuts to global health and development would achieve only symbolic savings but have a profound impact on human lives and dignity. In these austere times, we must not misplace our priorities. America’s leadership in the world is demonstrated, and assisted, through our assistance to the most vulnerable people.

But this talk isn’t new. Throughout government, we’ve been seeing a lot of these principles put in practice by many agencies and programs, including those working on foreign assistance. The State Department, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have all put a premium on becoming more efficient, effective and transparent in their support for poor nations and are embracing innovative ideas to save money and make a bigger impact.

On reform, we saw a slew of new proposals and strategies for improving US foreign assistance this past year, from the President’s Policy Directive and the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, to USAID’s new FORWARD reforms. All of these aim to reorganize agencies, reduce redundancies and red tape, and focus on monitoring and evaluation of programs to guide future funding decisions. The Millennium Challenge Corporation, created by the Bush administration in 2004, has been a front runner in this field for its innovative and transparent assistance to countries, which includes diligent cost-benefit analyses, clear and measurable goals and time lines, and the capability to pull funding from those countries that don’t hold up their end of the bargain. As the impact evaluation results start coming in for completed grants (compacts agreements), we hope to see even more evidence of the success of this model.

But in addition to just changing the way the US government delivers assistance, real change for the developing world will likely stem from new ideas, fresh thinking and harnessing science and technology to improve lives. USAID has already started upgrading its Office of S&T and has created the Development Innovation Ventures fund that will invest in promising innovative development breakthroughs and help bring successful ventures to scale. According to USAID’s announcement last fall, their first grant recipients include projects aiming to improve rural solar access, create an affordable fuel cell-powered bicycle, and develop a new way to measure the effectiveness of a cellular SMS election monitoring platform in reducing election fraud in Afghanistan.

Throughout other programs, technological advances are receiving a lot of attention. In the Feed the Future initiative, the US approach to agricultural assistance includes technology innovations such as drought-tolerant crops that will increase food production and food security. And the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, with support from the US and others, recently incentivized the development of two new vaccines for two of the biggest killers of children, pneumonia and diarrhea. US support has also helped pave the way for research into new tools like microbicides for women to protect themselves against HIV.

While some of these innovations do require small amounts of additional investment up front, they are poised to save significant money in the future, as efficiencies are realized, private sector funds are leveraged and partner countries take ownership of these programs. Other reforms — like the new USAID Dashboard that shows where American tax dollars are being spent on foreign assistance — have already been implemented and just make good sense. As President Obama said, “we shouldn’t just give our people a government that’s more affordable. We should give them a government that’s more competent and more efficient.”

At a time when government programs are on the chopping block and every dollar needs to be justified, it’s important that we support those programs that are making real reforms and changing lives for millions of people around the world. By standing with the administration to elevate our development work, America has the opportunity to showcase not just its military might, but its vision and leadership for a more prosperous world and the advancement of core US national interests.