Sarah Jane Staats from the Center for Global Development wrote this piece about Tuesday big foreign aid hearing on the Hill.

A proposal calling for what amounts to a complete makeover of U.S. foreign assistance was launched Tuesday at a packed event on Capitol Hill featuring remarks from Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), and Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D-NY). As Porter McConnell & Erin Erlenborn flagged in previous ONE blog posts, New Day, New Way: U.S. Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century Assistance for the 21st Century is an urgent call for reform from members of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network, a group of the prominent nonprofit leaders, think-tank experts, and academics co-chaired by CGD senior fellow Steve Radelet and Gayle Smith, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

New Day, New Way argues that foreign assistance is a key element of U.S. foreign policy and the national interest but needs a dramatic overhaul to meet today’s global challenges. It urges the next president, Congress, policymakers and the American people to take specific steps to bring U.S. foreign assistance up to date. All three legislators attending expressed similar views.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) said he was energized and “flabbergasted” at the large turnout for the event – more than 250 people packed into the Rayburn Building’s House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing room. “I will take a very serious review [of this report],” he said. “It is my firm belief that this won’t just be another process of stating how we want the world to be. It will be a pick-up-and-run-with-it report,” he added.

Sen. Hagel (R-NE), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said (more…)

The L.A. Times ran an op-ed yesterday suggesting the U.S. use the world food crisis as an opportunity to reshape U.S. agricultural policy, foreign aid programs and image abroad.

Some excerpts:

“In 1948, a first lieutenant in the Air Force named Gail Halvorsen began dropping candy bars attached to tiny handkerchief parachutes to the hungry children of Berlin. Many had never tasted chocolate before. The kindness of the “Candy Bomber” came to symbolize the spirit of American humanitarianism…

The global food crisis offers the United States a fresh opportunity to show the world its humanitarian mettle. In 2007, with prices soaring, the volume of food donated by rich countries to hungry ones actually shrank 15% to the lowest levels in nearly five decades, according to the United Nations….

So the U.S. will be asked to do more — and it should. The question is whether it can turn this crisis into an opportunity to remake the agricultural and aid policies that have racked up a 50-year record of expensive failure…

The big thinkers in both presidential campaigns should be mapping out more thoughtful responses to the global food challenge. That means crafting plans both to help the hungry and to improve perceptions of the United States in strategic and suffering areas.”

Read the full piece here.

Tomorrow the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) a network of global development experts from think tanks, humanitarian and development organizations, and advocacy groups, will launch a new report and initiative to bring U.S. foreign assistance into the 21st century.

The launch will take place at the Rayburn House Office Building from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m and the speakers include:

-Rep. Howard L. Berman, chair, House Foreign Affairs Committee
-Rep. Nita Lowey, chair, State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee
-Sen. Chuck Hagel, member, Senate Foreign Relations Committee
-Steve Radelet, Center for Global Development and co-chair, MFAN
-Gayle Smith, Center for American Progress and co-chair, MFAN

and MFAN members:
-David Beckmann, Bread for the World
-Ray Offenheiser, Oxfam America
-George Ingram, Academy for Educational Development
-Lael Brainard, Brookings Institution

Stay tuned. Tomorrow we’ll have reactions from a guest blogger!

-Erin Erlenborn

I often struggle to explain my work on “modernizing U.S. foreign assistance policy” to my family in California. But this week, I had something new to share with them to help convey the crux of the issue in one minute: a new video we helped produce at the Center for Global Development (CGD) called “Bring U.S. Foreign Assistance into the 21st Century.”

My family has been joined by another 8200+ individuals who have watched the video on YouTube since it was posted earlier this week and they’ve started to send us their comments. I’m delighted to report that the overwhelming response from viewers is: this video is “fun”, “short” and “makes the point” but that they want to know more.

Many of the policymakers I talk to in Washington tell me they care about foreign aid and global development but that the “American people” don’t want to hear about it and aren’’t interested in the policy details. So the enthusiastic call from people wanting to learn more is music to my ears. I recommend the following:

• Modernizing Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century: An Agenda for the Next U.S. President and CGD’s Modernizing U.S. Foreign Assistance Initiative, which includes: foreign aid 101, election ’08 issues, foreign aid budget analysis, details on Congress, and polling data.
• Rich World, Poor World: A Guide to Global Development on why global development matters for the U.S. and a range of topics including foreign aid, trade and labor standards, state building, HIV/AIDS, and education.
• Impact ‘08: Building a Better, Safer World. The Center for U.S. Global Engagement’s policy framework calling on the 2008 presidential candidates to elevate and strengthen support for development assistance and diplomacy.
• The bipartisan HELP Commission Report produced for Congress.
• ONE Campaign’s “More and Better Aid” resources and their ONE Vote ‘08 site

And keep your eyes open for the launch next Tuesday of “New Day, New Way: U.S. Foreign Assistance for the 21st Century,” a report endorsed by several of the country’s top foreign assistance and global development experts.

My hope is that the video can help you start a conversation with your own friends and family and demonstrate to your representatives in Congress and the White House that there is support for modernizing U.S. foreign assistance and a growing American constituency interested in improving our global development policies to help build a better, safer world.

-Sarah Jane Staats, Senior Associate for Outreach and Policy, Center for Global Development

Right now, the Senate is considering a $4 billion cut from the president’s 2009 request for poverty-fighting funding. Most devastating – if passed, this cut would be a $1 billion drop from 2008 levels.

Thankfully, Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Gordon Smith (R-OR) have introduced an amendment to restore $2.6 billion to the international affairs budget.

This is where ONE comes in.

We only have a week to get the majority of the Senate to decide to support this amendment – so we’re doing what we do best – launching a petition!

Add your name here.

We’re hoping to get 60 U.S. senators to sign up in support of Senator Durbin and Smith’s amendment – which means we need support from senators in every state in America.

I’ll updates you with how many ONE members have signed the petition, and how many senators have signed on, throughout the week. Please add your name and send the petition on to your friends. We only have 7 days to save billions of dollars worth of critical poverty-fighting programs for the most vulnerable among us.

3/10/08 UPDATE: The Amendment is now called the Feinstein-Smith Amendment. Senators Durbin, Sununu, Dodd and Coleman are co-sponsors for the Dear Colleague Letter.

On Saturday, December 1st, World Vision, Pioneer High School and The Journey Church sponsored a day to make kits for AIDS caregivers. Hundreds of people showed up to help! We had over a dozen ONE volunteers show up from around the Bay Area. The event started with a continental breakfast followed by a presentation by The Journey Church and World Vision Leaders. We saw a short film about a caregiver and how much she appreciated having a kit to use in her work. I really admire the compassion and selfless acts that caregivers provide their friends, family or neighbors who are sick with HIV/AIDS.

Each of the orange kits includes items like soap, wash cloths, gloves, flashlights and batteries. Every kit is also packed with a personal note from the person who put it together. We helped assemble 1,000 kits that will be sent to a country in Africa. To learn more about World Vision’s Caregiver Kit program and to see about hosting an event of your own go here .

Lori Saltveit – representing ONE Volunteers from the San Francisco Bay Area

Todd Shelton, Suzanne Kindervatter, Cherri Waters and Laia Grino, from the umbrella organization InterAction, just came by the ONE DC office to host a brown bag about their new Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Report.

The report looks at the U.S.’s current contribution toward meeting the MDGs. The entire assessment is worth reading, but one item that really stands out to me is on page 62.

That page lists the 20 countries that received the most U.S. aid in 2006 and then goes on to list the 20 poorest countries in the world in 2006. Critically, only four of these countries overlap: Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda and Uganda.

(The full lists are below. All stats are from the U.S. State Department.)

20 Top Recipients of U.S. Aid in 2006 (US$ millions)

20 Poorest Countries – each listed with the amount of U.S. aid received in 2006 in US$ millions.

You can download the whole report, including a color-coded world map of the above, here.

UPDATE: See the map below.

Key
Red=Top Recipient of U.S. aid
Yellow= Poorest country (by GNI capita)
Blue= Poorest countries that are also top recipients of U.S. aid