Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was fond of saying that the Department of Defense has “more people in military bands than (the State Department has) in the Foreign Service.” His observation reveals a discomfiting inequality in national priorities which has been thrown into sharp relief by battles over the upcoming budget. Far from […]
Tag: aid
How is it possible that in 2011 the world failed prevent famine in the Horn of Africa? The signs of disaster were present: two years of drought, no food storage, political instability, civil war and banned foreign assistance, but no one acted until it was too late. Now, three months later, thousands of people […]
Take a look at a satellite photo of Africa at night. Apart from a few specks of light over the largest cities, the continent is dark. Millions of rural Africans live without any electrical power at all, and the U.N. Development Program estimates that on a yearly basis the 19.5 million people of New […]
The world is full of endemic, intractable problems that we as a rich developed nation are asked to help solve: poverty, hunger, health problems, inequality, and more. Our efforts to address these problems through aid have had mixed results. Sometimes progress emerges, sometimes the same progress is reversed, and often it seems all our aid […]
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Health’s Deadline: 2015
At the turn of the millennium, world leaders decided the new era should see the end of extreme poverty and other basic development problems. In order to facilitate a worldwide focus on this broad aim, they crafted the Millennium Development Goals to set up detailed goals to be achieved by 2015. Out of the eight […]