As you may know, HIV/AIDS is one of the largest challenges we face as a global community. It reduces life expectancy and decreases economic productivity—burdens that have an enormous impact on countries already struggling with poverty.

Today, Senator Clinton signed the “Presidential Pledge for Leadership on Global AIDS and Poverty.” She joined Bill Richardson as the only other presidential candidate to have signed the pledge.

Here are two main points to which Hillary commits if elected:

Give more money
She commits to set aside “at least $50 billion to the fight against AIDS by 2013,” and to “make significant progress toward providing an additional one percent of the U.S. budget to fighting poverty in impoverished countries.” In 2003, President Bush committed to provide $15 billion to AIDS relief over a five-year period through PEPFAR (The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief). Currently, we rank 14^th in the Center for Global Development’s “Commitment to Development Index” (CDI). America is a rich and generous country—but we give a low portion of our economy to help developing countries. Let’s help close the gap between what we have given and what is needed to fight this epidemic—and an extra one percent would be a big improvement.

Streamline the system
By adding her name to the pledge, Hillary also promises to look into the “creation of a cabinet-level poverty-focused development agency.” This would help us focus our global development efforts. Currently, more than 20 different U.S. government agencies are involved in global development. This means that our foreign assistance programs are frequently fragmented and uncoordinated. U.S. assistance programs could be far less expensive and more effective if we put someone in charge with direct access to the President.

We here at Global Development Matters hope all of the candidates put their names on the pledge. Let’s take more of a leadership role in the fight against HIV/AIDS and global poverty!

Read the full article to find out more about this Presidential Pledge.

Those of us who follow global development news know that agriculture is a critical issue in the big picture of global poverty. From drought to hunger, food aid to farm bills, agriculture issues have a major impact on the ground in poor countries.

Of particular interest in the US is the Farm Bill, that big piece of legislation that is renewed every 5 years and gives subsidies for those growing specific crops.

All of these issues are related. How much money gets invested in poor countries in agriculture has a lot to do with the international market for the crops they would grow. The fact that three quarters of the world’s poor live in rural communities makes this issue even more critical.

The World Bank is taking notice. As Celia Dugger reports in the New York Times,

“Foreign aid for agriculture has plunged as support for global health and primary education has surged. The fight against AIDS and other diseases is keeping millions of people alive, and rising elementary school attendance is lifting literacy rates. But most poor Africans make their living in agriculture and need to grow more to feed themselves and earn their way out of destitution, many analysts say.”

The conclusion of the World Bank’s report is clear:

“Increased public investment in scientific research, rural roads, irrigation, credit, fertilizer and seeds — the basics of an agricultural economy — is crucial to helping Africa’s poor farmers grow more sorghum, corn, millet, cassava and rice on their miniature plots.”

Read the NYT article for more on this point.

It’s not too late to take action on the Farm Bill. Contact your senators today and ask them to create a Farm Bill that reduces misguided subsidies and shifts those resources to support the programs that really need the money.

Yesterday, foreign policy advisors from some of the Democratic and Republican campaigns convened for a roundtable discussion. At the dinner, former U.S. Senators Gary Hart (D-CO) and Nancy Kassebaum Baker (R-KS) joined over 60 prominent Iowans from both major parties in a challenge to all of the presidential candidates to elevate and strengthen America’s investments in non-military tools of global engagement to build a better, safer America and world.

Senator Hart noted, “Even before September 11, we knew America needed a new national security strategy to meet the new threats and challenges of the 21st century,” said Senator Hart. “Six years later, we still have not made the strategic investments in diplomacy and global development that are as vital to America’s security as is our military. The presidential candidates need to tell us how they will lead on this to keep America safe.”

Read the full press release courtesy of the Center for US Global Engagement.

Originally posted on Views from the Center by Ruth Levine:

The importance of involving communities and civil society organizations in development features prominently in the discourse of international agencies. Community involvement is vital, we hear, to reforming dysfunctional education systems, fighting disease, and overcoming corruption. But we hear much more about communities than from them.

How to reach the communities, and how to know if they have been reached? The answer, according to the Most Reverend Njongonkulu Ndungane, the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, is involve churches, mosques and other religious institutions as core partners, for implementation of programs and for monitoring of the development process. In Africa, he argued in a well-attended CGD event last week, religious life is a fundamental dimension of people’s lives. Houses of worship, however humble, provide education and information, community cohesion, and defense against the vagaries of government. (See One Year After the G8 Gleneagles Summit: Implementation, African Development and the African Monitor for transcript and video of the event.) Faith-based institutions can play a vital role in promoting development, and will do so more and more, as the Archbishop implements the African Monitor, a home-grown effort to track the effects of development policies at the local level through the region’s network of religious organizations.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Illinois) made a similar point in an NPR interview in July about his call to involve religious groups in social and economic development. “We make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in people’s lives,” Obama said, discussing politics and religion in the U.S. Instead, he said, people who want to make the world a better place can work collaboratively across religious perspectives to tackle hard problems of the day: the environment, urban poverty, international protection of human rights, the AIDS crisis in Africa and many others. Instead of being distracted by the political use of religion as a source of division, Obama said, “we need to forge some working coalitions that actually get some things done.”

After years of ideologically polarized debates about religion in public policy - both within the U.S., and in relations between the U.S. and the developing world - it is refreshing to hear such constructive discussions about how spiritual and religious life and leadership can contribute, at both global and local levels.

Originally posted on Views from the Center by Sarah Jane Hise.

Reform of our foreign aid organizations and legislation are not just of interest to a handful of congressional staffers and policy wonks, but critical to fulfilling Americans’ hopes for reducing poverty, helping countries grow and improving lives.

Support for global development may be the right thing to do, but getting it right also matters. Center for Global Development Senior Fellow Steve Radelet makes the following recommendations for getting it right:

1. Develop a National Foreign Assistance Strategic Framework. Such a document would outline our principal foreign assistance priorities and how the full range of executive branch agencies (State, USAID, Treasury, Agriculture, MCC, Defense and others) plans to deal with them as part of our broader policies for engaging with the world.
2. Rewrite the Foreign Assistance Act (FAA). The FAA of 1961 is badly out of date, nearly 2,000 pages long and includes a complex web of rules, regulations, multiple objectives and directives. A new FAA is central to clarifying the central objectives and methods of foreign assistance to meet U.S. foreign policy goals in the 21st century.
3. Create a new Department for International Development under the direction of one cabinet official for all U.S. foreign aid programs. This step would streamline the bureaucracy, reduce duplication, and strengthen our ability to align major programs with our key objectives. The United Kingdom took this step several years ago, and its foreign aid programs are now considered among the best of the bilateral donors.
4. Strengthen Monitoring and Evaluation. Monitoring and evaluation of U.S. foreign aid programs generally focuses on ensuring that funds are spent according to plan, rather than on their contribution to development or to achieving other objectives. The U.S. needs a strong monitoring and evaluation processes that measures impact of programs.

Fixing our arcane foreign policy organization and legislation in the U.S. requires interest and support from the American people and the politicians who represent them. Bono learned this long ago when he traded his MacPhisto image to become the “dean of the global poverati” and who now asks the 2008 U.S. presidential candidates what they would do for Africa if they were elected.Perhaps like Bono, the next time we look at ourselves in the mirror we should pause to ask ourselves whether the image staring back is the one we’d like reflected in the rest of the world. Are we doing what we can to ensure that U.S. development policy represents our values of freedom, hope and opportunity? Are we being smart about how we use our power to help prevent 10 million children dying each year of preventable diseases; help 77 million children not in school become providers for their families and perhaps even future leaders; and bring clean water to the more than one billion people currently without it? Are we helping countries grow their economies, draw private sector investment and provide jobs for people looking to earn their way out of poverty? Does it show our own $200 billion dreams for ending global poverty? Does it recognize, as Bill Gates’ mother did, that “from those to whom much is given, much is expected?”

My guess is that many of us will conclude that we don’t look as good as we might. And for this, we need to start the conversations with each other and the politicians who represent us about our hopes for a better world and the need for real foreign aid reform in the U.S. to get us there.