The Hill: Best practices in U.S. global development should guide effort to redesign
Jim Kolbe, honorary co-chair of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN)

“…If the ultimate purpose of foreign assistance is to ‘end its need to exist,’ as USAID’s new Administrator Mark Green has articulated, then the Trump administration should start its redesign process by looking back on what we’ve learned from 60 years of U.S. global development. The new design should consider what is working across U.S. development efforts and build from there, scaling up best practices that have made our foreign assistance far more efficient and effective in recent years. … [T]o fully embrace best practices we must balance accountability with flexibility. Sustained solutions require the U.S. government and its partners to maintain the ability to harness and adapt to changing needs, resources, capabilities, and opportunities in a timely and coordinated way that supports and enables local leadership. … As USAID considers continued reforms this fall, I urge Administrator Green and his team to remember that harnessing and adopting best practices to changing realities will not only offer the best hope for those our aid seeks to lift up, but will also eventually fulfill the goal of ending the need for the existence of foreign assistance itself” (9/24).