Populations and places experiencing humanitarian crises, from war and natural disasters to hunger and homelessness, continue to have critical, immediate needs that will require support from international and local humanitarian first responders. Every person everywhere in the world deserves to live a life free of violence, fear and precarity. While the U.S. government's existing humanitarian response infrastructure is well-designed to serve short-term rapid response needs, the U.S. humanitarian aid budget increasingly funds interventions in long-term crises with a lack of understanding of the social, political and cultural implications of a country’s or region’s own history. We know that communities closer to the issues know the solutions they need and must be in the driver’s seat of decision-making. The U.S. government must transition the management of these long-term needs to local actors and set clear, time-bound goals to do so. The U.S. cannot do this alone; other nations must share the responsibility for long-term funding.

At the same time, most of the countries the U.S. government provides development assistance to that are not experiencing humanitarian crises are ready to transition their relationships away from grant- and aid-based models to ones focused on promoting broad-based sustainable economic growth rooted in sound industrial policies. Evidence shows that investments in economic development do far more to improve sustainable development outcomes than project-driven ones. No country has ever graduated out of poverty as a result of aid.

The U.S. needs to evolve how it invests globally, with a much greater focus on creating opportunity, building markets and forging genuine partnerships with countries and communities around the world. Currently, it primarily uses foreign aid as a short-term tool that results in low-impact projects with poorly focused resources. To change this, the U.S. should transition most global development investments away from project-based aid in favor of more sustainable, country- and community-led models and make more investments that grow the private sector and promote sustainable economic development.

In sectors like power, health, water and sanitation, food and digital infrastructure, for example, the U.S. should administer significantly more global development funding via compacts where the U.S. and the country receiving funding create joint corporations to achieve clearly defined, measurable goals, share costs, and jointly select and pay service providers against delivery of results. The U.S. should also support countries to promote broad-based economic growth, make investing in the private sector the predominant way the U.S. supports countries with higher-state capacity, and better promote greater integration and two-way investments between the U.S. and other countries.

Rather than issuing complex public tenders and requests for proposals that only large government consultants can compete for, U.S. global development agencies should increasingly use:

Here and around the world, the next generation of community leaders, scientists and entrepreneurs is already building the digital and innovation economy. They want to see corresponding public investments to meet their ambition, including in enabling infrastructure, education, and research and development (R&D). While the U.S. is seen globally as an innovation power, its global development institutions are often stuck continuing the way they’ve always done things, or they invest in innovation only at the margins, failing to adequately respond to the scale of today’s needs.

Instead, these institutions should take a page out of the playbook of U.S. public sector investments in innovation in other sectors. Programs like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program have transformed the U.S. economy and given birth to the technologies that have propelled major U.S. companies like Apple.

Now is the moment for the U.S. to adopt proven innovation models to support global partners to build their own innovation ecosystems, develop and commercialize technologies to address the world’s biggest challenges, and create new markets and 21st century jobs. It can do this by:

Over the past 60 years, the U.S. foreign aid sector has become a cottage industry made up of a small number of Washington, D.C.-based contractors that are experts in the business of winning government contracts — with no or few incentives to eliminate the conditions that allow foreign aid to persist. Too often, U.S. global development agencies direct funding to these contractors to build capacity rather than just working directly via perfectly capable local organizations.

Instead, U.S. agencies must make an overarching focus of global development investments over the next decade to transition our model away from a charity-based one in favor of a system that enables countries to manage their own systems, whether via the public or private sector. Every U.S. development investment must have a strategy to transition the ownership, management and funding away from U.S. actors to local actors and, for programs where there is not a realistic pathway for local funding, a strategy that requires that other donors match U.S. investments within a time-bound window.

This would additionally apply to successful U.S. global development programs like the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which — while successful — have become too dependent on U.S. funding and therefore vulnerable to the whims of unpredictable political leadership in Washington, DC. Future PEPFAR funding, for example, could instead fund health insurance schemes that are easy for governments and other funders to co-invest in, supporting population health needs and creating realistic pathways to transition funding and management to local partners.

We know that communities around the world know what they need to bring about the change they need. Firsthand experience and local expertise is indispensable to address our world’s biggest challenges. Transitioning to models that put local actors in the lead is critical to stepping back from paternalistic tendencies that have often caused more harm than good due to the lack of emphasis on community leadership and deep listening or that have displaced or distorted the very markets and communities that global development institutions were initially built to support.

Most importantly, underpinning each of the above four ideas, what the U.S. demands of others it must first do itself. The U.S. cannot fund and defend destructive forces around the globe while simultaneously claiming to support democracy, human rights and development and expect the rest of the world to take it seriously. The U.S. can’t insist that it cares about peace and the planet while engaging in exploitation and extraction. It can’t claim to be helping to prevent the next pandemic while it also hoards excess vaccines and essential medicines.

The U.S. is inconsistent and hypocritical when it advocates that other countries invest sustainably, decarbonize and embrace transparency yet does not hold itself to these same standards. The U.S. is a signatory to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, yet it is one of just five countries that refuses to conduct a Voluntary National Review to track the progress it makes each year toward achieving those goals. Too many of the U.S.’s own companies run global businesses that perpetuate the worst forms of human trafficking and slave labor or destroy critical ecosystems.

As the U.S. rebuilds its global development architecture, it must act with humility and lead by example, recognizing that it also has its own long way to go to realizing its development goals, and to hold itself accountable to the same demands it makes of others.

Unlock Aid was founded as a coalition of doers. We’re not content to just propose ideas and hope that others will do the work. That’s why we’re already working with policymakers to translate these principles into action. We’re entering a period where long-held beliefs about the way things always work are rapidly changing. As the adage goes, “change happens gradually, then suddenly.” Now is the time to propose and build a new, more abundant way forward.

To realize this vision, the U.S. needs to restructure its global development agencies, complete with new mission statements; greater transparency; a transformation toward delivering results; and a mandate to act with greater urgency, agency and agility to embed the above principles into policy and practice.

‍Transformational change is essential for progress. With new mission statements grounded in these ideas will come clearer and more measurable goals. New policies that embrace greater transparency and accountability must ensure that U.S. government global development investments deliver and pay for results. Hiring processes, incentives and performance management must change too, with a focus on building and retaining a more diverse, next-generation workforce and leadership that includes different perspectives, backgrounds, expertise, skills sets and attitudes to inspire a new business culture that embraces urgency, equity, innovation, agility and experimentation. This is the only way to ultimately drive long-term behavior change.

The bulk of longer-term development assistance funding should flow through models that promote more broad-based, sustainable economic growth and that put community-led solutions and leadership at the forefront. The U.S. should continue to respond to immediate humanitarian, human rights and democracy needs, while the vast majority of the rest of the U.S.’s longer-term development assistance should flow through models that promote private sector and economic development, including via the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).

The U.S. should continue to make robust contributions to multilateral and international agencies that can demonstrate a track record of results and cost sharing with other countries. It should use its influence in these agencies to direct them to devolve more funding and decision-making agency to country- and community-level organizations and do more to embrace innovation.

‍The U.S. has vast resources and can be the bridge toward transforming the future of global development. This requires bold and rapid transformation that centers community-led expertise and leadership so that countries around the world have what they need to sustainably thrive. The U.S. should stop funding global development like it is the country’s corporate social responsibility account. Instead, it should invest in a way that recognizes the powerful potential that its investments, if made differently, can have to transform the world for the better.

Click here to see how we have translated these principles into illustrative legislative language.
Click here to see how we have adapted these insights to develop the New American Foreign Partnership Standard.