I started this blog mostly so that I could do some research into US foreign aid and report the results, which I have been doing. But I haven't written an article lately, and I realized that the reason was that I had really come to the conclusion that the Program Our Government Calls "Foreign Aid" (POGCFA for short) has very little to do with what you would think from its name: helping foreign countries. Instead, the POGCFA is mostly just a US corporate welfare program.
The latest question in my series on US foreign aid is this: who actually receives the money we spend on foreign aid -- are we sending it directly to foreign governments, charities, consultants, or what? Unfortunately, I was not able to answer this question definitively -- the US government does not appear to publish this information in its foreign aid statistics. Here is what I did find:
Today I was thinking about my previous posts on Foreign Aid. I realized that I have been basing my articles on total foreign aid, rather than strictly humanitarian aid, because the numbers I got from the USAID web site include military aid, aid used to fight drug traffic, and other items that do not fall under the category of humanitarian aid. So, I went back to the USAID web site, and downloaded numbers for aid from the USDA (agricultural aid), aid from USAID (mostly humanitarian), aid from the Peace Corps, refugee and migration aid, and Global AIDS Initiative aid.
The United Nations measures the level of human development of its member countries in its "Human Development Index" (HDI). This index is regarded as the standard measure for the well-being of people (especially children), and it incorporates measures of poverty, literacy, education, life expectancy. It is published regularly as part of the Human Development Report. Presumably, countries with a low HDI would be the ones in most need of humanitarian aid, and those with high HDI numbers would not need much, if any.
Transparency International (TI) is a well-regarded organization that works to reduce government corruption world-wide. They define corruption as "the misuse of entrusted power for private gain". Every year, they compile the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), which measures how corrupt countries around the world are perceived to be by experts in those countries.
In my earlier Where We Send Money post, I collected some facts about where the US government is sending aid, but didn't say too much about those facts. Here are a few thoughts.
Much of the assistance money that the US government sends out to the world goes through an agency called USAID. Their web site has a wealth of information on who we are sending money to, and why. Here are some interesting facts. Note that I have used the abbreviation M for millions, and G for billions (i.e. metric abbreviation for Giga, or 10 to the 9th power), and the numbers in [brackets] are references (see list below).
My main reason for starting this blog was to collect some thoughts and facts about foreign aid, though I will probably put some unrelated posts in the blog as well.