2013-05-19T11:05:19-04:00 Jeremy Konyndyk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=jeremy-konyndyk Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jeremy Konyndyk Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.2443501 2013-01-17T00:27:37-05:00 2013-03-18T05:12:01-04:00

Jeremy Konyndyk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-konyndyk/ Millennium Challenge Corporation; signed legislation creating an enormous new aid program to combat HIV/AIDS; and begun ramping up U.S. aid to Africa, on track toward ultimately tripling it. Obama has made some good headway in his first term, producing the government's first global development policy and an innovative new policy on disaster resilience, launching new efforts to combat global hunger, supporting reforms to the U.S. Agency for International Development and committing to greater aid transparency. But while Bush's major development achievements continue to enjoy broad bipartisan support, President Obama's achievements remain more tenuous and could be reversed in the future. As he enters his second term, the president should take several steps to cement his legacy on global development.

First, he should work with Congress to pass major foreign aid legislation. This will take more work than pursuing reforms under executive authority, but it will also enable him to be more ambitious -- changing legislative parameters rather than working within them -- and more confident that his reforms will endure. President Bush's tenure provides a good example. His PEPFAR program to fight HIV was legislated through Congress, and four years after he left office it is going strong and enjoys robust congressional support. Conversely, his attempt to restructure the foreign assistance architecture -- pursued independently of Congress -- gained little congressional support and has been largely reversed under Obama.

Obama's reform agenda, which has already faced congressional skepticism, risks the latter fate. But the political stars may be aligning to enable more ambitious -- and durable -- legislative reforms. The House unanimously passed Rep. Ted Poe's (R-Texas) modest but important bipartisan aid reform bill at the end of the last session, and the Senate came close but ran out of time. Both chambers appear open to sensible aid reform legislation. With John Kerry, one of the Hill's biggest aid reform advocates, moving to the State Department, Obama will have the perfect person to broker an even more ambitious deal: reforming the Foreign Assistance Act, which has not been rewritten since its passage during the Kennedy administration. The world has changed a bit since then, but U.S. law has not kept pace. Instead, the FAA has ballooned from 49 pages to over 400, with add-ons, workarounds and legislative barnacles (earthquake aid to Italy from 1976: still in there!) that hobble the coherence of U.S. aid. Reforming the FAA could enable Obama to lock in many of the reforms he is pursuing on his own and could also build congressional buy-in for his signature Feed the Future initiative, as President Bush did with PEPFAR legislation. Even better, just-departed Rep. Howard Berman (D-Calif.) has already done the legwork of developing a blueprint for a comprehensive FAA rewrite.

Second, President Obama should rein in the military's forays into foreign aid. One downside of President Bush's development legacy was an unprecedented expansion of military involvement in aid. Just as you would not want an aid worker leading a tank battalion, it turns out that soldiers are not terribly effective aid workers. The military can bring valuable tools in some circumstances, like major logistical capacities in the immediate aftermath of tsunamis or earthquakes. But in a classic case of mission creep, the military's embrace of aid has expanded well beyond its comparative advantages, frequently overlapping with existing civilian capabilities. Not only has the GAO found that this duplication wastes taxpayer resources at a time when the Pentagon needs to trim budgets, but research in Afghanistan and elsewhere has shown that it can also be damaging and counterproductive to U.S. policy objectives. In his second term Obama should direct the Pentagon to use the looming budget drawdown to right-size its aid efforts and to issue new rules limiting any future Pentagon involvement in aid.

Finally, the president should fix the impasse between terror financing regulations and humanitarian aid. Last year, amidst a dire famine in Somalia, the U.S. found itself blocked from sending aid to the famine zones, in part because of a 2-year-old tussle over nebulous terror financing rules. The government eventually issued a limited waiver allowing aid to go forward, but doing so took so long that tens of thousands of people had already starved to death by the time U.S. aid began to flow. This was an extreme case but not an isolated one: A parallel challenge surfaced following last year's earthquake in Iran, and another may be emerging now in Mali. President Obama could issue an executive order to avoid repeating this scenario, and he could also work with Congress to put in place a more comprehensive fix.

Obama now has four more years to seal his development legacy and a host of good options for doing so. None of these tasks would be easy, but all would have a huge impact on U.S. development policy and those it assists around the world.

This blog post is part of a series produced by The Huffington Post that closely examines the most pressing challenges facing President Obama in his second term. To read the companion article by HuffPost's Joshua Hersh, click here. To read the companion blog post by Amitai Etzioni of the George Washington University, click here. To read all the other posts in the series, click here.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1349443 2012-03-19T12:49:52-04:00 2012-03-19T12:51:10-04:00

Jeremy Konyndyk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-konyndyk/ Kony 2012 video as pointless squabbling, with Nick Kristof the latest to chime in. After all, they argue, how could anyone question an effort to raise awareness about the damage done by the warlord Joseph Kony and his militia, the Lord's Resistance Army?

This controversy should not be so casually dismissed. Criticism of the video reflects an important debate over how humanitarian advocates should responsibly and sensitively balance the priorities of accuracy and mass appeal -- and how that balance can affect the lives of those that advocates seek to help.

The fact that the most viral video in history is about a central African human rights issue, rather than a music debut or a laughing baby, is impressive. But advocacy messages that happen to resonate with the public do not lead inevitably to the right solutions. As Congo expert Séverine Autessere wrote in a recent journal article, advocacy narratives tend to frame the policy debates that ensue -- and overly simplistic narratives can cause real harm.

The stakes are high because policy mis-steps can have severe human costs. In December 2008, the U.S. supported a failed Ugandan military raid on Kony's camp, triggering horrific attacks by his militia that killed hundreds of civilians. More recently, a campaign to regulate "conflict minerals" inadvertently led to the collapse of the livelihoods of thousands of ordinary Congolese.

Does this mean advocates should do nothing, or stay silent? No. But it does mean they should approach their work with particular humility, care and precision. Invisible Children, the nonprofit group behind the now famous video, argues rightly that simplification is a necessary tool of public engagement. But there can be a fine line between simplification and distortion, and viral success does not excuse misleading one's audience.

The video's overarching message is that the LRA is able to terrorize central Africa due to a lack of global awareness. But in fact global institutions have been seized with this issue for years -- starting with the important advocacy efforts of the UN's top humanitarian official back in 2003. Kony has been indicted by the International Criminal Court and is listed as a terrorist by the U.S. government. The UN Security Council has issued multiple resolutions relating to the LRA. From 2006 to 2008 an internationally-backed peace process ended the conflict in Northern Uganda. And since 2008, UN peacekeepers and the Ugandan military have been hunting the LRA across central Africa.

There are times when a lack of global awareness actually is a core obstacle -- that was arguably the case with Kony when Invisible Children was founded in 2003. But given the wide array of diplomatic and security tools now working to bring Kony to justice, it is hard to conclude that awareness is still the main problem. The decision to nonetheless make that the video's core message is a disservice to the many people it has inspired.

Focusing attention on a single man also obscures the fact that the Joseph Konys of the world only arise in environments where weak governance, underdevelopment, conflict, and social injustice allow them to operate. These unsexy issues are the root problems, and Kony is their result. Focusing international political will on a manhunt detracts from engaging with the region's deeper development and security challenges.

The video's approach to activism is also problematic. It leads its viewers to believe that if enough people buy action kits, wear bracelets and sign a vague pledge, they will enable Kony's capture by the end of this year. This focus on advocacy merchandising has managed to offend broad swathes of people in Northern Uganda, who feel that it trivializes their suffering. An advocacy campaign should not viscerally offend so many of the very people it claims to help. The video glosses over how these actions would constitute a game-changer on the ground in Central Africa within the set time frame.

The choice facing advocates is not between doing something and doing nothing; the choice is how to do something, responsibly. Advocates have an ethical obligation to both the activists they speak to and the people they claim to speak for. This includes presenting their case without sacrificing accuracy, portraying affected people as more than just victims awaiting a savior and proposing realistic avenues for change. Is it possible to ignore these obligations, as Invisible Children has, and still have a net positive impact? Maybe, as LRA expert Chris Blattman argues. But after the inadvertent harm caused by other well-meaning but misguided advocacy, and the offense caused by turning this crisis into a marketing pitch, "maybe" is not good enough. Humanitarian advocates must hold themselves to a higher standard.

Looking ahead, let's hope that the current debate is a teachable moment for all sides. There is a valuable lesson here about the power of new media tools to engage overlooked constituencies of activists. But there is also a vital lesson about the importance of getting the message right, rather than just getting the message out.

Jeremy Konyndyk is the director of policy and advocacy at the global humanitarian organization Mercy Corps www.mercycorps.org. The opinions stated in this piece are his own, not necessarily those of Mercy Corps. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.890680 2011-07-07T10:14:00-04:00 2011-09-06T05:12:01-04:00

Jeremy Konyndyk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-konyndyk/ since the 1950s. The U.N. estimates that more than 10 million people face severe food shortfalls. Spanning across Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia, the current crisis could prove to be worse than the far better-known crisis in Ethiopia in the 1980s, which ultimately killed up to 1 million people.

The epicenter of the crisis is Somalia, where nearly 3 million people -- more than one-third of the population -- face possible starvation. Mercy Corps staff in the country, people with years of experience in humanitarian relief, have told me that this is one of the worst situations they have ever seen.

Yet as Somalia has descended closer to outright famine, the U.S. government has largely stayed on the sidelines, contributing only $14.5 million -- a tiny fraction of the need -- for food aid this year. The U.S. is the largest global donor to international hunger relief, so when the U.S. fails to show up, there is no one else who can be relied on pick up the slack.

Why is the U.S. doing so little to respond? Politics. In 2008, when most of Somalia's territory was occupied by Ethiopian troops in support of a U.S.-allied Somali government, the U.S. contributed 10 times more humanitarian aid to Somalia than it has this year. But when the Ethiopians pulled out in early 2009, most of southern Somalia was forcibly taken over by militant movements that the U.S. had designated as terrorists.

The shift in political control of the territory spurred drastic cuts in U.S. humanitarian aid due to overly broad U.S. laws on terrorist financing. As conditions in the country have worsened, U.S. laws on material support to terrorists have become a direct impediment to the drought response: the U.S. has avoided any humanitarian activity that might result in even a small amount of aid leakage to the militants. There is a safety valve for situations like this: a humanitarian exemption that the State Department could request from the Treasury Department. But State and Treasury have shown little interest in going that route.

Avoiding aid diversion is a reasonable goal, and one that humanitarian groups like Mercy Corps share. But the U.S.'s overzealous approach to this challenge now threatens to write off millions of Somalis who face the very real risk of starvation. As things stand now, the U.S. has withheld hunger assistance to the nearly 2 million desperately hungry civilians in areas that the militants control. Even in areas controlled by clans who actually oppose the southern militias, such as hard-hit communities of central Somalia, exaggerated USG fears about aid leakage have resulted in the U.S. providing only very limited support.

U.S. policy is not the only obstacle: the militant groups in the south bear substantial responsibility as well. The militants have imposed unacceptable conditions on aid groups, such as requiring that female staff be fired, and demanding extortionate payments. Caught between U.S. legal restrictions and the militants, Mercy Corps and most other international relief groups were forced to leave southern Somalia last year.

These obstacles are now costing lives. Huge numbers of Somalis depend on agriculture and livestock to survive, and they have been devastated: as harvests have failed, they are deprived of their local food; as their livestock have died, they no longer have income to buy imported food. The drought has left them without viable options for feeding themselves, and aid is nowhere in sight. In the absence of sufficient aid, hunger is now forcing tens of thousands of people to flee the country every month. Nearly half of the children who flee are malnourished, and reports are emerging of families burying children en route as they make their way to neighboring countries. Shockingly, those who make it out are the lucky ones; many more within Somalia are too poor or too weak to leave.

The U.S. could easily take a first step toward improving the situation by drastically ramping up humanitarian support to hard-hit northern and central Somalia, which remain outside militant rule. In the militant-controlled areas of southern Somalia, the situation is bleaker. There may be a way forward, but it will require flexibility from both sides. In the past, the U.S. has allowed food aid programs in politically sensitive areas with tightly controlled monitoring to ensure that food reaches its intended recipients. The militants in the south have just announced that they are willing to allow international relief groups to return, though the full details of this announcement are still being explored. If this looks like a serious opening, the State-Treasury "safety valve" that I mentioned earlier would enable the US to restart aid -- if the U.S. government felt inclined to use it.

If the militants in southern Somalia prove willing to allow open access for humanitarian groups, including robust monitoring, will the U.S. government be open to restarting aid? Or will several million people be consigned to starvation?]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.825881 2011-02-21T08:40:30-05:00 2011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00

Jeremy Konyndyk http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeremy-konyndyk/
Mercy Corps has long worked fragile and transitional states -- places like Afghanistan, Sudan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Iraq. We have seen firsthand that when development aid is done right, it can be a highly effective tool for bringing peace and prosperity to deeply troubled societies: fostering economic growth, assisting the return of refugees, restoring infrastructure and basic services, supporting civil society, rebuilding local government capacity, and mitigating sources of conflict. But getting it right is not easy. If Administrator Shah wants USAID to be heavy hitter on fixing fragile states, he should consider a few critical steps:

Maintain a Distinct Development Identity: A close visible relationship between development actors and international military actors undermines the effectiveness of aid -- particularly when those military forces are a party to the conflict. Research by Mercy Corps in Iraq and Afghanistan found that local communities report considerably higher trust and confidence in independent civilian aid providers -- and considerably lower confidence in aid that is linked to the military. In both countries, communities ranked Provincial Reconstructions Teams (PRTs) -- which are largely staffed and funded by the military -- as the least favored of any providers of aid.

In USAID's efforts to extend assistance programs to insecure areas, its staff in Iraq and Afghanistan have often worked from military bases and PRT platforms. This approach comes with an important tradeoff: by creating the impression of "development at gunpoint" USAID's close affiliation with the military alienates communities and raises suspicions about the true intentions of US aid programs. It also turns development activities into targets: a Washington Post report last year found that USAID/Afghanistan programs that were clearly affiliated with US counter-insurgency efforts were being specifically targeted by insurgents. Visibly de-linking aid efforts from the military could ultimately better serve US stabilization objectives.

Put the Money on Target, and on Time: USAID's "relief to development gap" -- the falloff between its emergency aid and long-term aid -- leaves the agency without appropriate resources during the critical early phase of a transition. For example, a ceasefire in August 2006 ended Northern Uganda's armed conflict, but USAID did not launch its first multi-year stabilization program there until February 2008. Governance and infrastructure funds did not start flowing until September 2009, more than three years after fighting ceased.

While USAID's Office of Transition Initiatives is theoretically responsible for this phase, it tends to focus on quick-impact interventions that do not link from relief to development. In lieu of a consistent mechanism for adequately resourcing transition work, USAID staff must frequently resort to stretching out short-term disaster response funding -- an inappropriate tool for post-disaster work -- while waiting for longer-term development resources to start flowing years down the road. USAID badly needs a new funding structure that can bridge the relief to development gap in post-crisis and post-conflict settings.

Transfer Capacity, Not Just Stuff: USAID's most effective work in transitional environments builds up the capacity of local institutions at the same time as it provides reconstruction resources. A partnership between USAID and Mercy Corps in postwar Kosovo put money on the table for infrastructure rehabilitation -- on the condition that local authorities developed accountability mechanisms, engaged civil society in setting reconstruction priorities, and involved ethnic minorities in decision-making.

This approach was slower than simply plowing ahead and conducting reconstruction projects firsthand. But this slower process left behind lasting capacity and set precedents for good governance and social inclusion -- critical elements of stability. In contrast, when USAID focuses on "quick impact" projects and tries to push money out the door quickly, it is much more difficult to advance true recovery. Research by Tufts University in Afghanistan found that "Spending too much too quickly with too little oversight in insecure environments is a recipe for fueling corruption, delegitimizing the Afghan government, and undermining the credibility of international actors."

Get Governance Right: Building effective local governance is a long-term process, requiring sustained investment in both the local institutional capacity to "supply" good governance and in accountability mechanisms that enable civil society and market interests to "demand" good governance. This kind of holistic understanding of governance assistance should shape the whole gamut of other stabilization assistance interventions. The way that aid is spent in fragile states impacts the viability of local governments: if an international actor is seen to represent an easy source of funds, there is little incentive for local authorities to govern responsibly nor for their constituents to hold them accountable. It becomes much easier to do an end-run around formal government structures and go straight to the internationals.

As one PRT civilian wrote of his experience in Iraq: "The government of Iraq became conditioned to look to the U.S. Army particularly and the U.S. Government more generally as the bill payer of first resort. We were often unable to get the government of Iraq to move forward on its own until we convinced it that we lacked or were otherwise unable to provide money..."

Seek Partners, not Puppets: USAID has a rich history of high-impact partnerships with local governments, local civil society groups, and international development agencies. At their best, these partnerships are a two-way street, with both USAID and its implementers contributing complementary expertise, creativity, and critiques. Unfortunately, as political pressure on the agency has increased in recent years, USAID has been moving away from this tradition -- often prioritizing control ahead of partnership.

While this shift aims to produce more reliable results, it too often achieves the opposite: oversight can become counterproductive when it verges into micromanagement. When USAID dictates everything from project tactics to org charts to minor budget items, the agency stifles innovation and risks prioritizing its partners' compliance capacity over their technical expertise and local knowledge. This is a recipe for problems in fragile states, whose complex challenges leave little margin for error and make grassroots relationships and a granular knowledge of context central to effective work. USAID would do well to recalibrate its approach.


Administrator Shah is right to argue for the relevance -- even indispensability -- of USAID in stabilizing fragile states. Taking the above steps would go a long way to making this vision a reality.

Jeremy Konyndyk is Co-Director of Policy and Advocacy at Mercy Corps, leading Mercy Corps' external policy work on Africa, Southeast Asia, and US foreign aid reform. Michael Bowers is the Regional Program Director for South, Central and East Asia at Mercy Corps. ]]>