The Nobel Peace Prize is being awarded this Saturday — but the prize is not always synonymous with lasting peace.
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Also in today’s edition: We dissect two fundamental legislative pillars of U.S. development — the Foreign Assistance Act and the newer Global Fragility Act — and how they’re being hobbled by, surprise, surprise, political polarization and bureaucratic red tape.
It’s contentious and imperfect but still the pinnacle of a global “job well done.” The Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded in Norway on Saturday and the joint recipients — Ukraine’s Center for Civil Liberties, Belarusian human rights campaigner Ales Bialiatski, and the Russian human rights group Memorial — are an obvious slap in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s face for invading Ukraine.
Given the lack of love that the West has for Putin and his cronies, this year’s cadre of winners is neither controversial nor surprising, but the Nobel Peace Prize doesn’t always equate to peace, my colleague William Worley writes.
Take the case of Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, who was given the prize in 2019 for his historic rapprochement with archrival Eritrea. Today, Ahmed stands accused of committing atrocities alongside Eritrean troops in the conflict-ravaged region of Tigray.
Other examples are more nuanced. Some say the prize was awarded prematurely to former Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for ending five decades of war with leftist FARC rebels — only to have a national referendum overturn his peace agreement. Ultimately, though, an amended deal was reached.
Berit Reiss-Andersen, chair of the Nobel committee, tells Will that awarding the prize early can encourage more action. “That is sometimes taking a risk, and we are willing to take that risk, and it’s exactly that willingness that I believe has made the peace prize so relevant.”
Read: The real world impact of the Nobel Peace Prize (Pro)
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Speaking of imperfect necessities, my colleague Michael Igoe breaks down the Foreign Assistance Act that created the U.S. Agency for International Development — and the law’s steady breakdown thanks to a dysfunctional U.S. Congress.
For over 60 years, the FAA — not to be confused with the other FAA, the Federal Aviation Administration — has served as the legal bedrock of USAID.
Normally, Congress would regularly reauthorize the bill, but Congress is anything but normal nowadays. The appropriations committees have had to take over because Democrats and Republicans can’t get the job done. But it’s not really the job of appropriators, who aren’t foreign aid experts, so they hew to the status quo and push major changes or reforms perpetually to the side.
DevExplains: Why the outdated law that created USAID is so hard to fix
Before pouring billions of dollars into helping countries torn apart by conflict, the U.S. government figured it might be wiser to spend a fraction of that to prevent conflicts — and the attendant humanitarian tragedies — in the first place.
Smart move by a country that lost trillions of dollars invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and failed on most fronts to turn either country into a prosperous beacon of democracy.
It seems like a development no-brainer — but the Global Fragility Act, passed in 2019, has faced years of delays and bureaucratic hurdles despite bipartisan support, my colleague Teresa Welsh writes.
The GFA was meant to be a paradigm shift to the band-aid approach of U.S. foreign aid, prioritizing conflict prevention strategies and peace-building programs instead. But since its passage, successive administrations have consistently missed GFA deadlines — something they apparently didn’t appreciate Teresa reminding them of (that’s a reporter’s job, folks).
Another problem: How exactly do you know a strategy is working if success is measured by conflicts that don’t happen or could’ve been worse?
DevExplains: What is the Global Fragility Act?
The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said Wednesday that individual countries are in charge of deciding how to use its funding. But my colleague Jenny Lei Ravelo reports that some African officials say the Global Fund only uses them when it’s convenient.
Neema Lugangira, a member of parliament from Tanzania, said the Global Fund asked her to make a funding appeal video to the U.K. for its seventh replenishment campaign, according to a report by Health Policy Watch.
But then the Global Fund didn’t bother to invite her to the actual replenishment conference in New York.
A fund spokesperson emailed Jenny to say that “a central tenet of the Global Fund is country ownership.” Some countries might beg to differ.
Read: Global Fund responds to parliamentarian accusations of neglect
This week, as more than 1000 Social and Behavior Change Communication practitioners, academics, and policymakers gathered in Marrakech for the international SBCC summit, the looming question was: How can we as a community solve the world's biggest problems?
But they also confronted some controversies, such as, how can the field expand to include urgent questions of climate change? And can communication solve for structural inequities? Some even disagreed that the C in SBCC should stand for communication: “It stands for contradictions,” one behavioral scientist told my colleague Amruta Byatnal, while another one simply said, “Lose the second C — we're here to create change and that goes beyond communication.”
Watch out for more reporting on the topic next week, and let Amruta know if you have any thoughts.
Related op-ed: The overlooked field of SBCC could change the race for SDGs
News of COVAX shutting down circulated this week, after the New York Times reported about a proposal to “sunset” the global COVID-19 vaccination program next year. According to the proposal, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance plans to stop providing vaccines to 37 middle-income countries.
Some have raised concerns on the move, saying COVID-19 is still an emergency. But Fifa Rahman, CSO representative at the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator, tells Jenny that it’s a “natural progression” given the “lack of demand” and difficulties of maintaining staffing levels. She says many countries see the pneumococcal conjugate vaccine and the human papillomavirus vaccines as a higher priority than COVID-19. Gavi’s board agreed on Thursday to relaunch its HPV vaccine program.
It also agreed “in principle” to “explore integrating future COVID-19 vaccinations” in the organization’s routine immunization programming, instead of a separate emergency program.
ICYMI: Gavi opens country applications to roll out new malaria vaccine
We are sharing our top 10 most-read opinion pieces of the year daily, and today we have No. 3 from health and human rights advocacy professor A. Kayum Ahmed who argues that global health power dynamics are warped by profit-driven interests.
I recently had the chance to moderate a panel on the documentary “The Ants and the Grasshopper” with director Raj Patel and Charles Owubah, CEO of Action Against Hunger, at a screening held at the German ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C.
For those who don’t know, the residence is one of the most impressive in town — sleek architecture and a terraced lawn with spectacular views of the nation’s capital. But it also has a secret inside: an underground space known as the Berlin Bar, where about 40 people gathered to watch the film about two Malawian women who travel to the U.S. to speak with Midwestern farmers about climate change.
It’s part cultural exchange, part culture clash, with sad overtones on both sides. But filmmaker Patel said farmers in Malawi don’t need pity from their U.S. counterparts — they need action.
“Pity is politically a very useless response … because the pity is all that they offered,” he said of some of the U.S. farmers. “It’s a way of insulating yourself from genuine political commitment.”
Only 16% of the $145 million appeal for Haiti's emergency cholera response has been met, as the Caribbean nation sees an uptick in the number of cases. [UN News]
The G-7 has increased its offer to $15 billion to persuade Vietnam to accelerate its transition from coal. [Reuters]
Racism, xenophobia, and discrimination are a threat to public health as they continue to drive global health inequities, according to a Lancet report. [The Guardian]
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