If you are looking for a glass-half-full assessment of the state of foreign aid, look no further than Carsten Staur.
The chair of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee has been in the job for 18 months, leading the largely closed-door group that defines what qualifies as aid, measures it, and peer-reviews each other’s efforts.
But the start of the Danish career diplomat’s tenure has seen many of the top donors on the 32-member committee announce deep spending cuts, including France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the European Union. The new Labour government in the United Kingdom is showing no sign of hurrying back to the 0.7% target of gross national income for official development assistance, or ODA, abandoned by the previous Tory administration. USAID is going backward in its effort to channel more money to local organizations. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is openly stating its intention to use its formidable aid budget as an arm of its “economic foreign policy” — i.e. in its own interests. Aid to the lowest-income countries is trending downward.