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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:

• On the USAID home page, if you use the “Country Locator” to visit the home page of a particular country, and then scroll down to the bottom, you can find a section labeled “Congressional Budget Justification”. From that page, you can click on links for each program, and see who might get the money for each sub-program. However, exact amounts are not given, and it’s a projection rather than an actual commitment. Also, if you wanted to collect information, even from a single country, it would mean clicking on several links and extracting names of organizations from the text.
• A more comprehensive picture comes from the USAID Yellowbook, which is a listing of all active foreign aid grants from USAID to organizations, businesses, and universities for a given year, by country. However, the most recent available version of this publication is from 2001, so it’s not very current, and unlike the other statistics on the USAID web site, it only covers the USAID agency itself, not other US foreign aid.

Given a choice between these two less-than-perfect resources, I decided that the Yellowbook was the more useful. It comes in either an Excel spreadsheet or a PDF file containing the names of the grant recipients, starting and ending dates of the grants, and amounts. Unfortunately, it does not contain any other information about the recipients (such as whether they are consultants, charities, etc.), it does not include recipients that are foreign governments, and there are also about 4000 entries in the list. To make the research manageable, I decided to focus on Nicaragua to start. Here is what I did:

1. Since the grants cover different time periods, I decided that it would make more sense to consider an annualized amount. So, if a grant covered one year or less, I used the amount from the Yellowbook, and if it covered more than one year, I divided by the number of years covered to get an annualized grant amount.
2. I looked up each recipient on Google, in order to determine whether it was a non-profit charity, for-profit consultant, governmental organization, etc. I was able to determine a category for all but one of the recipients.
3. Added up the annualized amounts for each category, and calculated percentages (thank goodness for Excel pivot tables!)

In the table below are the results for Nicaragua (and a few notes on definitions are below the table). They do not look too terrible, but I think (from looking at the Budget Justification pages) that the situation has changed somewhat since publication of these data. Also keep in mind that amounts given directly to the Nicaraguan government are not included, or funds from agencies other than USAID. It is interesting to note that only about 9% of the funds analyzed are going directly to agencies or co-ops based in Nicaragua. My feeling is that probably these organizations have the best chance both of creating Nicaraguan jobs and of knowing what is really needed by the Nicaraguan people.

Notes:

• NGO: Non-Governmental Organization, also known as a non-profit or charity; I divided them up into ones based solely in Nicaragua, and US or International ones working in Nicaragua. For the US charities, I also looked up ratings for many of them, and they were all highly rated for efficiency by independent ratings organizations (i.e. most of their funds go to their programs, not to fund-raising, administrative costs, or executive salaries).
• Cooperative League: These are leagues of American or International cooperatives, who were given money presumably for their programs of helping establish cooperatives in other countries
• Nicaraguan Co-op: A few Nicaraguan cooperatives were given grants directly
• US For-profit Company: For the most part, the recipients in this category are consulting firms that specialize in working on international development projects. However, they are operating as for-profit US businesses.
• US Government Agency: Includes the US Department of Agriculture, the Defense Department, and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency
• International Government Agency: Agencies, such as the World Health Organization, which are funded and run by multiple governments
• Unknown: I was not able to determine which category a listing for “Nicaraguan Development Center” should be put into.

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In a previous post, I wrote about some of the reasons why I do not think that world peace is possible. But some days I have more hope about it.

For instance, I recently heard Amy Goodman speak on the KUOW radio program “Speaker’s Forum”. One of the things she said (which I think is correct) is that if people in the US really knew what was happening in Iraq, the war would soon be over. She also said that rather than being a silent minority, pacifists are actually a “silenced majority”. Basically, she was implying that the news media are largely to blame for the non-peaceful situation we are in, by keeping the US public ignorant of what is really happening and making us feel isolated by not telling us what other people really think about it. So maybe the first step on the path to world peace lies in a media revolution, which actually seems a lot easier than changing US foreign policy and world religious teachings. Once the people understand what is happening, they will demand peace, and the leaders will have to deliver it.

Another ray of hope is the Non-Violent Communication movement. The basic premise is that by understanding that everyone has the same basic human needs and desires, and that everyone is subject to the same basic human emotions, we can learn to state ours and listen to others’ in a simple and direct way, without violence or coercion. The movement teaches a method for such communication, which can be used for everything from talking with your friends and family to negotiating between governments. Learning about non-violent communication helps me believe that there is a viable alternative to war, which, after all, is just a very violent (and unproductive) way of communicating disagreement. So once we have all decided that we don’t want war any more, there is a good tool out there to help us sit down at the table with our former enemies, and work out the terms of peace.

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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. However, my conclusions are substantially the same, because for the most part, countries’ rank in humanitarian aid is similar to their rank in total aid. There are a couple of exceptions — notably, the first three countries in per capita total aid (Marshall Islands, Palau, and Micronesia) are not ranked highly in humanitarian aid (which is to say, they are getting mostly military aid from the US). But apart from that, my previous conclusions hold: even if we consider only humanitarian aid, our decisions on where to send it are based on something other than humanitarian need.

Here is a new spreadsheet, so you can see for yourself…

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