Close to 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa live in a state of permanent power outage. The Grand Inga Dam would divert the Congo River near its mouth and meet the electricity needs of more than 500 million people.

Providing foreign aid means making a long-term investment in developing our aid partners, which results in both trade and security benefits for the U.S.

Africa has long been a place where charity goes to die. Tragically, most of this aid has been wasted, either stolen by corrupt local politicians or handed out in a way that traps people in a state of dependency that only generates more need for aid.

Bolivia's expulsion of USAID this month is a troubling development on its own, but when viewed in the context of similar actions by other governments, it raises questions about the future of American foreign assistance in the face of authoritarianism.

Everyone I visit talks about freedom, a future in Syria beyond this horror. There is so much suffering, but in the suffering there is a unity that catches me by surprise.

International aid money and donor priorities need specifically to allocate resources to target sexual violence, instead of camouflaging it under other programs or outright ignoring it.

The real change in -- and the future of -- development assistance is not coming from its traditional donors but from its recipients.

As Turkey makes this transition, donors like the United States should pitch in by supporting the United Nations' regional response plan for Syria. If the situation in Turkey is serious, then conditions within Syria are truly dire.

The World Bank cannot afford to waste public resources on approaches that have failed in the past, and campaign groups will be closely watching the IDA negotiations that begin in Paris this week.

As dynamics within Egypt's domestic politics continue to shift, a new paradigm for mutually recognized strategic interests between Cairo and Washington is urgently needed.

On a recent trip to the Middle East, USAID Assistant Administrator Nancy Lindborg and I stopped by the apartment of Om Faisal, a widowed grandmother. Shattered by war, separation, and hardship, she and her family had fled Homs, Syria and are now a few of the 720,000 Syrian refugees.

The women of Syria and their children -- the families who have been displaced two or three times -- urgently need our help, and it is our responsibility as the international community to push harder than ever for the access we need to reach them.