U.S. development community welcomes Obama policy (updated)

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Fact Sheet: U.S. Global Development Policy

President Obama's Development Policy and the Global Climate Change Initiative (pdf)

President Obama's Development Policy and Global Food Security (pdf)

President Obama's Development Policy and the Global Health Initiative (pdf)

Today, the President signed a Presidential Policy Directive on Global Development, the first of its kind by a U.S. administration. The directive recognizes that development is vital to U.S. national security and is a strategic, economic, and moral imperative for the United States. It calls for the elevation of development as a core pillar of American power and charts a course for development, diplomacy and defense to mutually reinforce and complement one another in an integrated comprehensive approach to national security. It provides clear policy guidance to all U.S. Government agencies and enumerates our core objectives, our operational model, and the modern architecture we need to implement this policy.

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U.S. development community welcomes Obama policy

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The new development policy “is, as the president said, a new way of doing business,” said Oxfam America’s director for aid effectiveness Greg Adams. It “contains some incredibly profound changes to the way the U.S. pursues global development policy.”

Chief among those changes is that Obama said that “development is not just aid, it is not just money,” Adams said. “It is also about various policies being pushed through. He specifically called out the lack of investment in agricultural development around the world, a general lack of focus, and an inability to make hard choices in development policy. And he said he was going to fix these things.”

Also appealing to Adams, Obama said that the U.S. government was going “to stop abetting failure” in part by identifying and expanding the programs that are shown to work.

Indeed, development community sources say they were far more impressed with what the White House rolled out last week than they had anticipated.

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Aid groups cheer Obama development plan

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"Traditionally, foreign aid wasn't very popular in the United States and no one thought it was important," said Rev. David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, an advocacy group that urges lawmakers to end hunger at home and abroad.

"Helping developing countries is really important to the United States for security and moral reasons," Beckmann said Thursday. "(It) will provide a rational and more coherent policy that will work to reduce global poverty and ensure economic growth in poor countries."

The most important part of the administration's new focus is that it puts poor people in other countries in charge of their own development, said Gregory Adams, director of aid effectiveness for Oxfam America.

"There is misconception in America that people are poor because they don't have stuff and that if we give them enough stuff: food, schools, medicine, they won't be poor anymore," Adams said. "But if you don't get people involved in their own development they won't escape poverty."

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Updated to add:

Obama’s Development Reforms: From Charity to Growth

Our guest blogger is Andrew Sweet, a Research Associate at the Center for American Progress.

Last Wednesday, President Obama outlined his global development strategy in an address to the United Nations General Assembly. This was the result of an intensive review process that began last summer and involved nearly 20 agencies and departments. The process took longer than hoped, in part because at times it became entangled with the State Department’s first-ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, or QDDR.

The new global development policy — laid out in a Presidential Policy Directive — looks to provide clear policy guidance to the current archaic development architecture where United States Government agencies are pursuing over 1,000 different development goals, objectives, and priorities and are governed by legislation first passed in 1961 and amended frequently — and often without much coherence — since that time.

The initial reviews of the new approach to development are in, and they have been strongly positive. Global development experts have said the policy has “exceeded expectations” and that President Obama showed “bold leadership” in announcing his new policy.

Some of the key policy outcomes of the PPD include:

• Formulation of a U.S. Global Development Strategy approved by the President every four years.

• Creation of a Global Development Council of leading figures from civil society and private and philanthropic sectors

• Establishment of an Interagency Policy Committee on Global Development to set priorities and coordinate development policy across the executive branch

Congress has also been supportive of the new reforms. Senate Foreign Relations Chairman, John Kerry, called the President’s development policy “bold and transformational.” Both Senator Kerry and his colleague, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman, Howard Berman, stated that they are looking forward to translating the proposed policy reforms into law. (How this plays out on the Hill will be crucial, and some members have grumbled that they were not well briefed as the global development review and the QDDR moved forward.)

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