The debate on the UK’s aid budget has never been more polarized. A small group of aid critics use the national newspapers to launch weekly attacks, arguing that deficit reduction should come first and that the aid system is inefficient. Aid agencies and business leaders respond that, actually, smart, transparent aid works well. The two sides talk across one another with no appetite for genuine dialogue, aping the playground politics of Prime Minister’s Questions. Now the Chancellor has confirmed the aid budget will be fixed from 2013 at the international target of 0.7% of national income, we owe it to the two most important groups – the taxpayers and the recipients – to have a more grown up conversation about aid.

The way the debate is framed is partly responsible. Asking “does aid work?” is as absurd a question as “do schools work?” or “is government good?” Some aid works well and some doesn’t. Sometimes schools fail. Sometimes governments get things wrong. The effectiveness of any one program depends on a large number of complex variables, and it’s simplistic to argue that the failure of some aid, some schools or some government policies negates the need for aid, schools or governments.

Those involved in aid programs have been too defensive about admitting failure. Publications like the Engineers Without Borders’ Failure Report, which showcases where projects went wrong, are the exception. This is despite many development experts extolling Tim Harford’s “Adapt: Why success always starts with failure”. Yet too often supporters of aid feel they are in an all-out propaganda war, driven by the fear of politicians cutting aid and funding for UK NGOs. The Department for International Development is similarly reluctant to admit where things haven’t worked out. For a department that is ranked the most transparent amongst its global peers – and under the last government had its exclusive focus on poverty reduction enshrined into law – it’s a clear area for improvement.

The silence on failure is all the more puzzling because the field of international development has been one of the more eager adopters of randomized controlled trials – born out of medical research – to find out what interventions have the most impact. An open and honest assessment of what works and what doesn’t is one of the simplest ways to improve public policy making. It should enable DFID to advance its aid effectiveness even further and better inform British citizens about how their money is being used.

The denial of aid successes correspondingly undermines the case of the critics. Jonathan Foreman claimed in a January issue of the Spectator that overseas aid is “at best useless and at worst counterproductive”. This unfortunate hyperbole detracts from some of his legitimate criticisms. Each year, the UK gives 80 million children life-saving vaccines they would not otherwise receive. Thanks to aid, debt cancellation and African leadership, 51 million more children attended school in sub-Saharan Africa in 2010 compared to 1999. Donor investments have also helped spark innovations in agriculture, such as the Green Revolution, which have had a dramatic impact. Neither vaccinations nor schooling nor investment in innovation would be covered by Foreman’s suggestion to focus UK aid on humanitarian emergencies. Indeed the attempt to split aid into emergency humanitarian assistance (good) and ‘development’ aid (bad) is misguided and superficial. Emergency assistance can be a vital tool to save lives as in East Africa during the 2011 famine, but it can also be problematic weakening a country’s institutions. In some cases the most effective way to provide aid is by supporting the government directly – the budget support that many critics deride as encouraging waste and corruption. Budget support can be an efficient way of ensuring universal public service delivery and preventing the build-up of parallel and duplicative institutions. In its first year, the UK-supported Free Health Care Initiative in Sierra Leone reduced by 61% the number of women dying from pregnancy complications at health centres.

The factual inaccuracies continue with a re-writing of the history of the East Asian Tiger economies. South Korea received a total of $13 billion in official development assistance between 1945 and the late 1990s to help rebuild its economy. Taiwan received an average of $100 million from the United States each year between 1950 and 1965, equivalent to almost 10% of GDP. East Asia’s progress was driven by strong institutions and political will, but foreign assistance played a catalytic role. Indeed, South Korea and Taiwan are now both aid donors.

Critics often use numbers dating back to when African countries gained Independence, ignoring the huge amounts of aid that was wasted during the Cold War – something all sides agree on. To caricature: much of Cold War aid was used to secure political and economic influence, including propping up some brutal dictators, not to help alleviate extreme poverty. Since 2000, in part because of the Millennium Development Goals framework, aid has become more poverty focused. Out of African 14 countries that qualified for debt relief, do not rely on natural resources and were conflict-free in the 2000s, nine are on track to halve extreme poverty by 2015 compared to 2005. Child mortality in the group is down by 22%. This was funded by a large increase in domestic resources due to GDP growth averaging 6% and foreign investment sharply increasing, and by a 41% increase in aid.

In the UK this was facilitated by creating DFID with a seat at the cabinet table and by increasing spending through it. DFID reported that in 2011/12 they supported 5.3 million children (almost half of them girls) to go to primary school and prevented 2.7 million children and pregnant women from going hungry. Nobody has forensically disputed the accuracy of these numbers. Indeed, it would be one of the greatest government hoaxes in history if DFID’s results were proven to be widely false. The generous interpretation of the critics’ argument is therefore they believe these outcomes cause more long-term harm than good – brutal logic for those alive today because of donor support. A debate about dependency theory led by the recipients of aid would be far more legitimate.

A more constructive debate on the UK’s aid budget is necessary. It could deliver conclusions that speed us towards the day when non-humanitarian aid is no longer needed in the same quantities. On that goal, at least, both sides would surely agree.

Follow Joe Powell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/josephpowell

At this critical juncture, the world wants to know: How much aid does China give Africa? Does it help or hurt aid from the United States and other Western donors? It’s been hard to tell, since China releases little information, outside estimates vary widely, and their aid doesn’t come in the form of traditional OECD-type assistance. Plus, there aren’t any mechanisms to accurately measure aid from non-DAC countries. Perhaps until now.

To help answer these questions, an organization called AidData compiled a database of thousands of media reports on Chinese-backed projects in Africa from 2000 to 2011. The database includes information on 1,673 projects in 51 African countries and on $75 billion in commitments of official finance.

Here’s what they discovered: official development finance to Africa seems to be roughly similar in size to the finance provided by the US. And that – a pretty significant amount – is just from the official numbers. According to Brad Parks, the co-executive director of AidData, it’s kind of impossible to give an exact number, since so much aid comes in the form of labor, expertise and other kinds of non-official aid like in-kind donations, making it really hard to measure.

But before you make your assumptions about Chinese aid, here’s some surprising facts on Chinese aid from the Center for Global Development’s new report on the findings from AidData, “China’s Development Finance to Africa: A Media-Based Approach to Data Collection,” which you can access here.

1. Chinese aid to Africa is not new 
Although this may be the first time you are hearing about Chinese aid to Africa, it’s not new. China has been giving aid to Africa since 1956.

2. The majority of Chinese aid from the past decade, among other things, go toward transport and storage, energy generation and supply and communications.
Some Africans say that the Chinese, unlike donors in the West, have a knack for knowing what Africans really need – including vital infrastructure projects like these. According to economist Yan Wang from Peking University, China accounts for more than 30 percent of total value of infrastructure projects in Africa, higher than other donors. And African governments, businesses, and citizens are all clamoring for infrastructure investment.

3. Women, food aid and education rank as some of the lowest priorities for Chinese donors
No explanation needed here, but experts at AidData suggest that it may be due to the fact that these are major focus areas for Western donors.

4. Ghana, Nigeria and Sudan are the biggest recipients of Chinese aid
Those countries received about a quarter of a trillion dollars in the past 10 years. Most of the projects are going toward – surprise, surprise – infrastructure, like oil pipelines.

 5. Chinese aid takes a very different “form” than traditional Western aid 
Not necessarily a bad thing, just different. These forms (or “unofficial finance”, as the report calls it) include foreign direct investment without state involvement and NGO aid. This makes it hard for experts, both in the West and in China, to track.

6. There’s a lot of assumptions about Chinese aid – it’s hard to say whether they’re true.
Many people are saying that China is giving to Africa just because they want access to their natural resources, don’t care about environmental or labor standards, and funding projects that have a weak link to growth. But the Center for Global Development encourages people to do their research when making these claims. Why? Because there’s no robust evidence to prove these points. Read up on it in Section 3 in the report.

AidData’s database is the first step in increasing transparency on Chinese aid to Africa – but it is by no means a completed project. Hopefully, thanks to the help of crowdsourcing, it will help measure aid from other emerging G20 countries like India, South Korea and South Africa, which like China, do not give aid through traditional DAC standards.

Kudos to AidData for creating this database, and we’re excited to learn more insights on aid from new donors. And don’t forget to read CGD’s report here.

Did any of these facts surprise you? Tell us in a comment below. 

Almost every week on the Frontline Health Workers Coalition’s blog, someone from our 30 member organizations tells another story illustrating the inspiring and tremendous impact frontline health workers are making in saving and improving lives around the world. What might not be as well known is that, according to USAID, 0.0000087 percent of the US budget in 2011 went to global health programs, including programs that help thousands of frontline health workers save millions of lives.

Frontline health workers are saving and improving lives. Photo credit: Intrahealth

Several surveys of the American public have shown that many people think these investments in global health and development comprise at least 10 percent of the budget. When it’s pointed out that global health funding comprises far less than a penny per taxpayer dollar, the already strong support for these programs grows substantially. The power of this support from the American people has resulted in leadership from Democratic and Republican presidents and bipartisan support in Congress of robust global health investments.

This tradition of strong bipartisan support for improving global health continued earlier this month with President Barack Obama’s release of his fiscal year 2014 budget request.

According the Kaiser Family Foundation, President Obama requested $8.3 billion in FY 2014 for global health programs under USAID and the State Department. This amount would be more than $260 million (or 3.2 percent) more than was enacted for FY 2012, or $142.3 million (or 1.7 percent) more than the estimated allocation for FY 2013.

The training and support of frontline health workers is integral in the improvement of life conditions. Photo credit: Intrahealth

Investments specific to the training and support of frontline health workers are made within programs to improve maternal and child health, improve nutrition, increase access to family planning, and prevent and treat diseases such as HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and pandemic influenza.Because these investments are so widespread between different government agencies and within different programs of government, it is imperative that in order to get the most bang for our buck, the US government have a strategy on how its programs will address the frontline health workforce crisis.

Members of the US Congress and those within US government agencies are taking notice of a need for such a strategy. US Representatives Nita Lowey (D-NY) and Ander Crenshaw (R-FL) recently introduced a resolution calling for government agencies “to develop a coordinated and comprehensive health workforce strengthening strategy with concrete targets for increasing equitable access to qualified health workers in developing countries, particularly in underserved areas, with a strategic focus on frontline health workers.” The US Agency for International Development (USAID), meanwhile, has created the new Office of Health Systems. Staff members in the office are working with their counterparts across the US government on a results framework focused on strategies to strengthen health systems, including improving support for frontline health workers.

Staff members are now working in correspondence with counterparts from the US government for further supprt. Photo credit: Intrahealth

The Frontline Health Workers Coalition will continue to work with the US government to get the maximum benefit of America’s global health investments by ensuring that the frontline workers needed to deliver health care in the developing world are well trained and supported.

Do more: ONE asked regular Americans what they thought of foreign aid. Watch the video and see what they said. 

The fight against corruption is messy, unpredictable and often dangerous. In developing countries it has historically been most acute in countries with large deposits of oil, gas and minerals, and involves the diversion of huge sums of money that could otherwise be spent on poverty eradication.

That’s why this week’s agreement in Brussels for all 27 European Union member states to require extractive companies to publish the payments they make to governments is potentially such a game-changer. Transparency of this kind releases information that will make it harder for natural resource wealth to be lost to corruption or captured solely by elites. 

The European decision follows a similar US law which passed in 2010 and came into force last year. It is to the credit of policy-makers on both sides of the Atlantic that the laws match each other in many respects, including requiring reporting to be on a project-by-project basis and for publication of all payments over EURO 100,000/$100,000 respectively. Both sets of lawmakers also rejected industry pressure for an exemption for reporting in the most autocratic countries where secrecy laws might be passed in the future, deciding these were precisely the places where greater transparency is needed most. This is the new global standard for legally binding transparency in the extractive industries.

Now attention should turn to two key issues: globalising the standard even further; and putting in place a plan for ensuring all the forthcoming data is used for accountability purposes.

The G8 focus on natural resource governance presents an opportunity to make progress on both. First, the G8 countries not covered by Dodd-Frank 1504 or the EU Accounting Directive should commit to passing their own equivalent measures by the end of the year. Canada, home to over 2000 extractive industry companies and the largest non-African investor in mining in Africa, is a natural priority. Mining groups and civil society are currently working together to make a recommendation to government in the coming months for how this might work in practice. As co-chairs of the G20 anti-corruption working group Canada is also well placed to win support from other major players in the sector, including Australia, South Africa, Brazil and China.

The G8 can also help mobilise financial support to help the end-users of extractives data hold governments to account. These include parliamentary committees, supreme audit institutions, media, international organisations and local civil society. A new multi-donor ‘Follow the Money’ fund could be set up to support this. There must also be international vigilance to support the activists on the frontline of campaigns against corruption, such as the Publish What You Pay coalition member recently arrested in Gabon.

The momentum in favour of transparency and openness in the extractive industries is remarkable. It is testament to the organisation and commitment of the activists involved, and to the bravery of political leaders who persevered and stuck to their principles in the face of fierce lobbying. This is deservedly a moment for celebration but it would be a mistake to become complacent. The battles to make this transparency standard truly global, and ensure the data delivers the improvement in people’s lives that all sides want to see, will be just as tough. Europe struck an important blow in the fight against corruption last night. Now we must make sure it is not the last.

15 Instagram buy-outs; salaries for 1,020 Lebron Jameses, 600 Kobe Bryants, and 1,245 Albert Pujolses; 30 million iPads. These are just a few of the things you could have purchased if you had a spare $15 billion burning a hole in your pocket recently (and really, don’t we all?). But yesterday, the Global Fund added a big ticket item to that list that’s much more compelling: the chance to help save lives and control AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria in hundreds of countries around the world. 

We’ll take this over iPads any day of the week.

As donors meet today and tomorrow in Brussels, the Global Fund unveiled $15 billion as its “replenishment ask”— the amount it hopes to raise from interested stakeholders over the next three years (2014 to 2016) to support its work. Readers who have followed this issue with us for a while will know that this is a process that the Global Fund goes through every three years. In the last replenishment for 2011 to 2013, they succeeded in getting commitments totaling just under $12 billion, so this year’s replenishment will represent a big step up.

In a time of economic restraint in most donor capitals around the world, coming up with $15 billion will require more than just digging under the couch cushions. It will require donors like the US to fight back against potential budget cuts, and we’ll get our first clue from the US when President Obama’s 2014 budget is released tomorrow. It will require Europeans to step up their commitments, just as we asked of them in our World AIDS Day 2012 report. It will require new donors, both from Europe and from emerging economies, to invest for the first time. It will require African nations, whose citizens are some of the most heavily impacted by these diseases and whose economies are in some cases growing the fastest, to recommit to spending 15 percent of their national budgets on health. It will require new partnerships with the private, faith and NGO sectors. And it will absolutely require ONE members from around the world using their voices, putting pressure on each of these groups, and letting them know that they will be celebrated and supported for doing the right thing.

The work will be hard. But if we can to find a way to get the Global Fund the $15 billion it needs, and if we can convince other actors to continue scaling up their other health investments, we can achieve some pretty historic things. In fact, the Global Fund estimates that if collectively we could help fill the majority of a global $87 million funding gap for the three diseases, the world could look quite different by 2016:

- More than 18 million people in affected countries could receive antiretroviral treatment by 2016

- 17 million patients with TB and with multidrug-resistant TB could receive treatment, saving almost 6 million lives between 2014-2016.

- Millions of new cases of malaria would be prevented, saving approximately 196,000 additional lives each year than could be saved with current funding levels.

- More than 1 million new HIV infections could be prevented each year.

That’s a world so beautiful it would be worth Instagramming 15 times over. We hope you’ll join us in this fight.

Show your support now. Sign our petition telling world leaders to keep up the fight against AIDS by supporting the Global Fund.

Last October, I told you about BTAP, the Global Movement for Budget Transparency, Accountability and Participation. Last week, BTAP launched their budget transparency campaign – Make Budgets Public Now! The campaign will focus on ensuring that governments publish the essential documents that enable citizens and civil society to participate in the budget processes in their country, and ensure that their priorities are being addressed in those budgets.

Watch the Make Budgets Public Now! video to see just how important budget transparency really is:

Make Budgets Public Now! [english version] from Global BTAP on Vimeo.

This is a big deal. Without information about the budget, citizens can’t hold their leaders accountable for their tax dollars, or any other resources the government spends in their name. Every government should publish the budget proposal, an audit of the progress against the proposal, and a citizens’ budget (a simplified version of technical budget documents) – and allow public hearings during the budget debate. Most of these documents exist already – they’re just not public. And that’s plain wrong.

Read this post for more information about the International Budget Partnership’s Open Budget Index, which ranks and measures the transparency of 100 country budgets.

Together, we can make sure that budget processes become more transparent and accountable to citizens.

ONE was able to work with Senators Leahy and Graham and Representatives Hal Rogers, Lowey and Granger to add about $200 million over the President’s FY13 request to global health programs.  This means that the U.S. will be able to contribute about $1.6 billion in FY13 to the Global Fund.  This funding level is more than $500 million more than the Global Fund would have otherwise received under a Continuing Resolution.  PEPFAR will receive $3.9 billion.  A whopping $160 million over the President’s budget request for FY13.

Unfortunately, it’s not all great news.  Feed the Future, GAVI and other development programs are all seeing reduced funding levels due to sequestration.  And adequately funding lifesaving programs in FY14 will be even more difficult.

We have to keep up the pressure on Congress and the President.  FY13 funding levels show what can happen when we pull together to give voice to the world’s poorest people.  The outcome wasn’t perfect, but it was absolutely amazing to see funding increases when nearly every other program the federal government funds was being cut.

So thank you… for calling, writing and visiting with your Members of Congress.  It worked and millions of people will continue to benefit from lifesaving programs that fight HIV/AIDS, childhood illnesses and hunger.

This week, the presidents of the world’s leading emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (known collectively as the BRICS) – are meeting in Durban for the annual BRICS summit.

The “Africanized Agenda” for this year’s summit, where the BRICS’ cooperation with Africa is under the spotlight, means that investment in extractive industries is a high priority on the agenda. And extraction of Africa’s oil, minerals and gas is where the national interests of each of the BRICS nations and those of African governments converge.

This is good news for the huge BRICS’ business delegations that have booked out Durban’s beachfront hotels. But it’s a source of concern for civil society coalitions, whose interaction with governments and the new BRICS business council has been limited by the worrying absence of any formal means of engagement.

Civil society’s concerns center on the veils of secrecy that still plague the extractives sectors of the BRICS – secrecy around corporate ownership, contracts and revenue flows. This secrecy is allowing phantom firms – anonymous “shell companies” created for the sole purpose of shifting profits across borders into low tax jurisdictions or havens – to rob citizens of the revenues to which they’re entitled. In addition, it’s a serious disincentive to foreign direct investment as few astute investors are willing to invest in opaque environments that offer no accurate accessible data with which to make decisions. And without information on what revenues governments are receiving from companies, how those revenues are invested, and what results they’re achieving, parliamentarians and citizens can’t hold government leaders accountable for the use of revenue that they’re managing on citizens’ behalf.

ONE is urging BRICS’ Finance Ministers to open up their extractive sectors. We’re calling on them to mandate all oil, gas and mining companies listed on the national stock exchanges of the BRICS countries to disclose their payments to governments in the countries in which they operate, and to publish the names of the people who ultimately own or control listed companies and their subsidiaries.

We’re calling on securities exchanges to put in place regulations to ensure that extractives companies submit country-by-country and project-by-project reports on their payments to governments in all operational jurisdictions, to align their reporting with open data standards, and to make this information publicly available online.

It makes good economic sense. Not only do disclosure regulations help improve investment climates, combat corruption and reduce tax evasion, their application by securities regulators can help improve the functioning and attractiveness of BRICS’ stock exchanges and draw more companies to list in these emerging financial centres. Harmonised rules and standards across the BRICS’ exchanges can help level the playing field, reduce corporate costs associated with following different practices in different jurisdictions, and lower reputational risks for companies should they be accused of bribery and fraud in host countries. Transparent reporting also strengthens companies’ social license to operate by making clear to host communities how much state and local level revenue companies are paying to extract resources.

And what responsible government would turn down the opportunity to improve collection of owed revenue and to better track the massive incoming and cross-border capital flows their countries’ resources are generating? It’s an essential step towards higher public savings and better domestic resource mobilization for the BRICS and for all resource-rich countries. And it’s a golden key to securing the critical development finance needed to deliver public services to populations in need.

Late last week, the House and Senate passed their budget resolutions, which outline each chamber’s tax and spending priorities for the year.

In the House, Republican Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget balances the federal budget in 10 years through cuts in both mandatory and discretionary spending. His budget recommends reducing the International Affairs Budget (IAB) to $38.7 billion – a cut of 7 percent from the already lower, sequester-level of spending. The House budget resolution passed solely with Republicans votes: 221 to 207.

In the Senate, Democratic Budget Chairwoman Patty Murray’s budget eliminates sequestration by raising taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals, and cutting some mandatory spending. (The Senate budget does not balance over 10 years.) The IAB fares significantly better under the Senate approach. Senator Murray’s budget recommends $45.6 billion for the IAB – an increase of 10 percent from the sequester-level of spending. The Senate budget resolution passed solely with Democratic votes: 50 to 49.

During debate on the Senate budget resolution, Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., introduced two amendments which would have had a big impact on our ability to fund the poverty-fighting programs we care about. One of his amendments, cutting $15 billion from the foreign affairs account to fund domestic transportation projects, failed by a vote of 26 to 72. The other, to cut spending in the amount of our UN dues, was not voted on.

Remarkably, the President’s FY14 budget is expected to be released in mid-April after both Houses voted on their budget frameworks. We are keeping a close eye on the President’s requested level of spending for lifesaving global development programs.

As expected, both the House and Senate budgets are largely political messaging documents, containing policies (tax increases, mandatory spending cuts) that are not likely be enacted.  However, the House Appropriations Committee will now have the daunting task of allocating funding for programs, including those that provide life-saving HIV/AIDS treatments, childhood vaccines and nutrition programs, under a substantially reduced budget cap. The Senate Appropriations Committee has more money to allocate. At some point this year, the House and Senate will have to reconcile their spending levels.

ONE will continue to work with both parties in the House and Senate to ensure that the IAB receives the largest allocation possible and that the appropriations committee prioritizes lifesaving programs. Under these tough budget constraints, your voice is more important than ever.

We’ve come too far to turn back now. Millions of people are living healthier, more productive lives due in part to US assistance. Africa is rising and it is in our moral, economic and national security interests to continue to engage with the African people to ensure a bright future for all of us.

- Jennifer Olson, ONE US Government Relations Team 

What if you could take a fraction of a penny and use it to help build a health system? Believe it. It takes only a fraction of a single penny per American taxpayer dollar to train a global health workforce—a workforce that will reach millions through treatment, prevention and counseling services.

Just ask midwife Teddy Tiberimbwaku, who had the opportunity to meet Uganda’s vice president last month.

Photo caption: A midwife at the Kyabugimbi Health Center in Uganda draws blood to establish HIV patient’s CD4 count. The equipment and training was provided by USAID. Photo credit: USAID

Last year, Uganda’s Ministry of Health, operating with only one doctor and 13 nurses to serve every 10,000 people, was told by the Ministry of Public Service that not only could it not create any new positions, but also any unfilled positions—some 42 percent of them—would be lost.

Yet last month, Ugandan Vice President Edward Ssekandi, on behalf of President Yoweri Museveni, celebrated and honored the work of Teddy and other health workers at the “Celebrating Health Workers in Uganda” event. Other awardees honored for their inspiring work included Prof. Francis Omaswa, Dr. Yasur Mubarak and Dennis Tabula.

In addition to highlighting the contributions of individual health workers who have worked tirelessly to save the lives of their country’s most vulnerable and strengthen the overall health system, the event marked a new $19.8 million investment by the Ugandan government to fill critical health workforce positions throughout the country—a true show of in-country leadership and ownership. Just how the Ugandan Parliament approved such a significant amount of money from its limited budget exemplifies why the United States invests in global health.

Furthering the bipartisan legacy of American leadership in global health has helped slash child mortality around the world by 70 percent over the last 50 years, end smallpox, and put polio on the brink of eradication, President Obama and members of Congress from both parties have laid out a bold, yet achievable, vision to put an end to preventable child and maternal deaths, and create an AIDS-free generation.

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and its non-profit partners, like IntraHealth International, recognize that a major barrier to realizing this vision is a severe lack of trained and supported health workers, especially those on the frontlines of care. The World Health Organization estimates that 1 billion people have little or no access to essential health services, and that at least 1 million more frontline health workers are needed to deliver these services in developing countries. Global supply of antiretroviral drugs or vaccines cannot suffice without the health workers to deliver them to those in need – they are the backbone of any health system.

Such a crisis cannot be solved by the United States alone. We must work closely with our developing country partners to help them develop sustainable solutions that work in their own local context. This is why we are truly heartened by the commitment of the Government of Uganda to solving its health workforce crisis.

IntraHealth’s Uganda Capacity Program, supported by USAID, works with the Ugandan Ministry of Health on health worker staff audits for three years. The program keeps tabs on how many health workers are employed throughout the country, where they are, how many positions are vacant, and other key data that many developing country governments lack.

So when the Uganda’s planning ministry proposed the hiring freeze for the health sector, Uganda’s Ministry of Health and supporters of health workers across the country literally had the data at their fingertips to illustrate just how disastrous the freeze would be to the country, which has one of the highest maternal mortality rates globally, and the tenth highest HIV/AIDS prevalence rate in the world, according to UNAIDS.

Ugandans pushed their agenda forward using the power of evidence, which led to a budget passed in September 2012 that set aside almost $20 million to increase financial incentives for doctors who serve rural areas and created more than 6,000 jobs for new health workers who will improve the health and wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of Ugandans.

The Ministry of Health and the Uganda Capacity Program are now working on a sustainable, data-driven allocation plan for these in-country investments in health workers. Meanwhile, USAID and IntraHealth are working together through mechanisms such as the Frontline Health Workers Coalition to amplify our collective belief that trained and supported health workers are crucial to giving millions access to health care, and in turn, creating a healthier, safer, and more prosperous world.

 Send a letter to your elected official and tell them to protect our US foreign assistance!