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Development assistance funding by international donors is rarely channeled through local actors. While there are strong normative and practical arguments to localize funding (i.e. directly channel funding through local actors), progress has been piecemeal as donors are largely left to their own devices to decide how/when/where and how much to localize.
The post Making Foreign Aid Work: Navigating the Aid Localisation Conundrum appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Over 40 years ago, rich country governments agreed to give 0.7% of their GNI (Gross National Income) as official aid to poor countries for development assistance.
The average aid delivered each year has actually been between 0.2 to 0.4%. The shortfall has therefore accumulated to almost $5 trillion dollars at 2012 prices, while total aid delivered in that same time frame has reached $3.6 trillion.





This update includes updated charts and graphs that look into this further.

Read full article: Official global foreign aid shortfall: $4 trillion

40 years ago, rich country governments agreed to give 0.7% of their GNI (Gross National Income) as official aid to poor countries for development assistance.
The average aid delivered each year has actually been between 0.2 to 0.4%. The shortfall has therefore accumulated to $4.37 trillion dollars at 2010 prices, while total aid delivered in that same time frame has reached $3.19 trillion.

This update includes updated charts and graphs that look into this further.
Read full article: Official global foreign aid shortfall: $4 trillion

"Humanitarian assistance is part and parcel of the war machine," said one observer. It is used by the various factions as a political weapon against opponents.

Foreign aid to Somaliland has fostered authoritarian rule and contributed towards conflict in the eastern city of Las Anod. In recent months, the apparent miracle of democracy has fractured as conflict has led to hundreds of deaths, and hundreds of thousands displaced. Jethro Norman writes there is a clear international dimension to the crisis. Those in Washington, London and Brussels are oblivious to the problem right under their nose: the consequences of their own aid and investment strategies.
The post Foreign aid and conflict in Somaliland first appeared on ROAPE.
The post Foreign aid and conflict in Somaliland appeared first on ROAPE.

Plus: Trump gets gagged, DeSantis spends big, techno-optimists get a manifesto, and more...

Rather than relying on foreign aid, countries struggling with hunger and low incomes should pursue institutional reforms such as strengthening private property, opening markets, adopting stable money, and removing barriers to entrepreneurship including farming.

Media have today covered a report by the International Development Committee on the effectiveness of UK aid spending.

As the U.S. Congress gears up to vote on a supplemental spending package that includes $14.3 billion in aid for Israel, Democrats on the Hill have started questioning the long-standing bipartisan consensus in Washington to supply military aid to Tel Aviv with very few strings attached.
President Joe Biden and a large majority of Congress have thus far expressed full support for Israel's military response to Hamas's October 7 attack, but a short-term pause in the fighting has given some Democrats time to air concerns about how Israel is waging its war. Nearly a dozen senators met with Israeli officials in Washington on Monday to have what Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) called an "extremely frank" discussion about how the war is unfolding.
Democratic senators have remained tight-lipped about whether they support placing conditions on aid to Israel or how they will vote on the upcoming spending package, instead conveying general discomfort with Israel's conduct during a war in which it has killed more than 15,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, according to the government media office in Gaza. Senators have also expressed concern about escalating settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
"We want the president to secure express assurances from the Netanyahu government regarding a plan to reduce the unacceptable level of civilian casualties, and we want the Netanyahu coalition to commit to full cooperation with our efforts to provide humanitarian assistance to civilians in Gaza," said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.). "The bottom line is we need those express assurances. How we achieve that is something that we are discussing right now."
"I fully support Israel's right to pursue those who ordered and carried out the attacks of October 7th. But Israel must not do so in a way that leads to massive civilian casualties and the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza," added Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) in a statement. "This will only incite more enemies against Israel and the U.S."
This growing discussion serves as more evidence that Washington's support for Israel's war is causing a split among Democrats in Congress. While Biden has helped broker a short-term pause to hostilities that is set to expire this week, other Democrats have demanded that the U.S. push for a more long-term ceasefire. In the nearly two months since the October 7 attacks, the number of Democrats who publicly support a ceasefire has slowly grown to 49 as of Wednesday. Public opinion polling has shown that a strong majority of Americans support a ceasefire in Gaza."Achieving a lasting ceasefire remains the most urgent priority for all sensible advocates and policymakers," Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, tells RS. "But as efforts to secure a ceasefire continue, it is encouraging to see growing talk about conditioning aid to Israel, which was once unimaginable on Capitol Hill."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has been criticized by progressive advocates for stopping short of calling for a ceasefire, has been one of the few Senate Democrats to explicitly endorse making military aid subject to more conditions on the way it is used. "Currently, we provide $3.8 billion a year. President Biden has asked for $14.3 billion more on top of that sum and asked Congress to waive normal, already-limited oversight rules. The blank check approach must end," Sanders wrote in a New York Times op-ed last week. "The United States must make clear that while we are friends of Israel, there are conditions to that friendship and that we cannot be complicit in actions that violate international law and our own sense of decency."
Other Democrats have pushed back on this idea. "Any legislation that conditions security aid to our key democratic ally, Israel, is a nonstarter and will lose scores of votes," Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) said in a statement.
"I don't think there's a need for conditionality," Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Ben Cardin (D-Md.) added on Monday. "The way the president has handled his conversations with the Israelis has produced tangible results, including the amount of humanitarian assistance and the strategy on the military side."
Amid these debates, U.S. Senators were shown a film produced by the Israeli government showing footage of the Hamas attacks in October. The images left Senators in "tears and silence," according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Biden has called the idea of conditioning aid a "worthwhile thought," but administration officials has since said that it was "not something we're currently pursuing," according to Politico.
The Intercept reported on Tuesday that Sanders could force a vote on conditioning aid in the coming weeks.
Conversations in the Democratic caucus revolve around the Leahy law, which prohibits the U.S. from providing military aid to specific units where there is credible information that they have committed gross violations of human rights. As Josh Paul, a veteran State Department official who resigned in protest of the administration's approach to the war, explained to RS last month, Israel is held to different standards than other countries when it comes to the application of the law.
"For most countries, we vet the units that are receiving the systems before they receive the assistance," Paul said. "In the context of Israel, we provide the assistance, and then if certain allegations come to light of potential gross violations of human rights, we investigate those and decide if such things have actually happened."
What these discussions in the Democratic conference mean for U.S. policy in the short-term remain unclear, especially as most in Congress continue to strongly support aid for Israel, but as the war likely continues, it will be a question that lawmakers may not be able to avoid.
"Irreversible trends in how voters see Israel's brutal actions means this focus will only increase going forward," says Sperling. "In light of Israel's unprecedented toll on human life and also on U.S. global credibility, ending U.S. complicity in these cruel and illegal Israeli policies can't come soon enough."
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has said that the Senate will vote on the administration's emergency supplemental request as soon as next week, but a possible attempt to condition support for Israel only adds another roadblock to a sprawling bill that will likely also spark debates over future aid for Ukraine and border security policies.

There is little secret that proponents of total victory in Ukraine have trained their focus on ensuring that a $60 billion Ukraine military aid package, introduced by the Biden administration late last year, is passed by Congress. Its backers claim this aid is of vital, even existential importance, but what effects could this package actually have on the battlefronts in Ukraine and what is really at stake in the debate over Ukraine aid more broadly?
The funding, part of a larger $95 billion supplemental package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, allocates $20 billion to replenish Department of Defense stockpiles after previous rounds of Ukraine aid, around $14 billion for Ukraine to purchase weapons from U.S. entities, $15 billion in support including intelligence services and military training, and $8 billion in direct budget support for the Ukrainian government. This sum, though prodigious in an absolute sense, pales in comparison to the $113 billion in Ukraine aid approved by Congress in 2022 during a time in the war when the balance of forces was much more favorable to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) than it is now.
The AFU faces a cascade of critical challenges; prime among them are its growing shortage of troops and its dire munitions deficit in what, according to Ukrainian officials, has become an "artillery war." The aid package strives to alleviate Ukraine's mounting shell hunger, but money does not directly translate into readily-available munitions. It is not clear how many shells, and how quickly, the U.S. can send Ukraine even if the supplemental was approved today. Russia, according to estimates by RUSI from earlier this year, fires 10,000 artillery rounds per day. Consider, for a sense of scale, that European annual production by February 2023 totaled just 300,000 rounds — or roughly what Russia has spent every month in Ukraine. Russia — which is believed to have made around 2 million artillery shells in 2023 — outproduced its Western counterparts at a rate of seven to one, according to an Estonian intelligence assessment from last year.
Josep Borrell, Europe's top diplomat, noted that Europe cannot shoulder the burden of supporting Ukraine on its own, but there are signs that Washington could struggle to backfill some of Ukraine's core needs even with ample political will on both sides of the aisle. Indeed, there is no immediate fix for revamping the U.S. defense-industrial base to support the staggering scale of Ukrainian munitions expenditures. U.S. officials have announced plans for an incremental production ramp peaking at 100,000 shells per month, but this target will not be fully met until at least October 2025. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Ukraine needs 2.5 million shells this year — or roughly 208,000 per month — to sustain its war effort, suggesting a shell usage rate that the West simply cannot underwrite in the short to medium term even with the supplemental funding bill.
Kyiv's severe materiel deficits are accompanied by equally serious manpower shortages, a problem that the West cannot alleviate short of direct military intervention in Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has struggled to craft a viable mobilization strategy amid spiking domestic divisions even as the number of foreign volunteers has declined from its peak of 20,000 in early 2022. These shortages are driven not only by Ukrainian casualties, which reportedly exceed the 31,000 total combat deaths claimed by Zelenskyy last month, but by depopulation trends so stark as to verge on demographic collapse. Kyiv must likewise grapple with the second-order effects of waging a prolonged and costly total war; a more expansive mobilization program would take even more people out of the labor force, further straining Ukraine's limping wartime economy.
Moscow is not a static actor in this unfolding drama. The Russians keenly perceive Ukraine's weaknesses and are racing to exploit them to the fullest extent, leveraging their vast manpower and firepower advantages to apply pressure all along the line of contact in Eastern-South Eastern Ukraine in the aftermath of Avdiivka's fall.
In short, the Ukrainian war effort is on life support. Its collapse is, for the first time since the Russian invasion commenced in 2022, now a distinct possibility. What can the $60 billion aid package achieve in light of these grim realities? It will undoubtedly help Ukraine impose costs on and slow the pace of Russian advances. Though it will not forestall the continued threat of a collapse, it will likely give the AFU a lease on life through the coming months. But, as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) accurately observed, it "is not going to fundamentally change the reality on the battlefield."
Importantly, to acknowledge the limits of Western aid is not the same as suggesting that there is absolutely no value in continuing to support Ukraine. Indeed, a scenario in which the AFU collapses and Ukraine gets steamrolled by Russian forces would be dangerous for everyone involved and make it more difficult to reach a durable settlement. But it is equally true that any plan to support Ukraine must be coupled with a sober assessment of what can and cannot be achieved at this stage in the war.
Prospects of continued Western aid to Ukraine are an important, if not principal, source of leverage vis-a-vis Moscow in this war, but leverage tends to dissipate if left untapped. The problem is not aid as such but, rather, a continued insistence on maximalist war aims that are increasingly detached from this war's realities.
Proposals to sustain Ukraine's defense through 2024 in a bid to push Kyiv toward a new counteroffensive in 2025 are setting the AFU up for a re-enactment of the disastrous 2023 counteroffensive, if not worse. Plans involving NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine have wisely been ruled out by most Western leaders.
Advocates of maximalist war aims in Ukraine have been remarkably successful over the last two years in affecting their policies both on and off the battlefield. From HIMARS rocket launchers and SCALP cruise missiles to Patriot missile systems and Leopard 2A6 main battle tanks, Ukraine has been saturated with a vast and potent array of Western weaponry. The international sanctions regime on Russia is by far the largest in history and growing, with the EU now on its thirteenth package of restrictive measures while the U.S. Treasury Department constantly looks for opportunities to further tighten the screws on Moscow.
The $60 billion supplemental is the latest such measure, but the issue has never been a lack of action — it's the absence of a viable endgame in Ukraine. Speaker Mike Johnson has called on the Biden administration to articulate "a clear strategy in Ukraine, a path to resolving the conflict." Indeed, it is vitally important to re-center the Ukraine debate on achieving consensus around a realistic framework for war termination.

In a recent interview with Jordan's government-backed broadcaster, America's top military officer lavished praise on the country's armed forces.


"We have common interests and common values," said Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "The Jordanian Armed Forces are very professional. They're very capable. They're well led."


Milley's view represents the most common American line on the Jordanian military, which has long enjoyed a close relationship with the Pentagon. There's just one problem: It's dead wrong, according to Sean Yom, a political science professor at Temple University.


Where Washington sees a small-but-mighty army, Yom sees a "glorified garrison force," as he wrote in a chapter of the recent edited volume, "Security Assistance in the Middle East." The Jordanian military, he writes, is "more accustomed to policing society to maintain authoritarian order at home than undertaking sophisticated operations."


As Yom notes, the regime that the Jordanian military defends has become increasingly autocratic in recent years. King Abdullah recently approved a cybercrime law that would allow the government to jail its citizens for promulgating "fake news" or "undermining national unity" — terms that the law largely leaves undefined. The crackdown on expression comes just three years after the government crushed the country's teachers' union, which had previously acted as a primary vehicle for political opposition in Jordan.


So what does the U.S. have to show for its decades of lavish support for Jordan's military? And what can that tell us about how Washington should approach security aid? RS spoke with Yom to find out. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.





RS: The conventional story of U.S. security assistance is that, even though some of the countries that we help are authoritarian in nature, our aid tends to lead to greater respect for democracy, and if it doesn't do that, it at least will strengthen partner militaries. But in your chapter, you describe a different story in Jordan. Can you walk me through that a little bit?


Yom: U.S security assistance is typically justified through the doctrine of "building partner capacity." There has been a lot of ink spilled on the importance of modernizing the Jordanian Armed Forces and ensuring that it is a capable, coherent and interoperable armed force that can seamlessly work with the U.S. military or conduct operations on its own in the service of defending Jordan, or bolstering regional stability, for instance, by undertaking counterterrorist operations or contributing to peacekeeping missions.


The problem is that there is very little historical evidence that the Jordanian military is actually a capable fighting force, and I think a few key pieces of evidence underlie this. Number one, Jordan really hasn't fought a major armed conflict in a half century. It's undertaken peacekeeping abroad through the moniker of the UN, and it occasionally conducts one-off missions such as its airstrikes against the Islamic State in Syria back in 2014. But there is very little evidence on the battlefield that the Jordanian military is what the U.S. would call a capable and competent partner military. The other piece of evidence is that much of Jordan's defense structure has partly been offshored to the United States. The border surveillance system between Jordan and Syria was built by Raytheon Company through U.S. military and economic grants, and much of Jordanian airspace is monitored as closely by the United States as it is by the Jordanians themselves. The significant U.S. military buildup in Jordan is part and parcel of the United States interest in defending the sovereignty of Jordan and ensuring that foreign aggressors — whether they are terrorists or militant organizations or even foreign states — do not penetrate very far into the Hashemite Kingdom.


We don't see a military that is being built to be capable and modernized and independent and combat ready. Instead, the overriding justification — internally at least, seldom mentioned publicly — is that U.S. security assistance in Jordan is designed not to build partner capacity but to ensure political access to the Hashemite monarchy and to lubricate U.S.-Jordanian relations to make sure that this bilateral alliance is smooth and allows both sides to achieve their mutual interests. In Jordan's case, [its interests are] to remain stable, to receive aid and arms from the United States, and to preserve its sovereignty, and in Washington's case, it's to make sure that there is a pro-Western oasis of moderation in the heart of the Near East.


RS: A question that's underlying a bunch of this is whether the monarchy and the system as it exists in Jordan could even continue to exist without American support. To put it bluntly, does U.S. aid underwrite autocracy in Jordan?


Yom: I think it does, but with a few caveats. The first is that, in comparative perspective, Jordan is not unique in being a middle-income country whose autocratic regime needs foreign aid to survive. The other caveat is that I don't necessarily think that U.S. support and aid is the only reason why the current system of government in Jordan is able to endure. It has its own survival mechanisms, whether it is rallying support from certain constituencies in society, such as some tribal communities, or leaning heavily on other partners in the region.


But I will say this: U.S. support may not be the only reason, but it is a major reason why the Hashemite monarchy and its regime has been able to maintain its current political strategy of maintaining power, which is not to democratize or alleviate repression but rather to maintain an authoritarian status quo. And I think U.S. support is also a major reason why the Jordanian leadership has very little incentive to grant meaningful political reforms such as curtailing corruption and granting more democratic freedoms, which clearly a majority of Jordanians desire. And we know this from public surveys. Jordanians are very explicit in what they are unhappy about the current political system, but they also feel that, because the U.S. often refuses to pressure the Jordanian government to grant or concede more of these reforms, they feel that the U.S. is complicit and preserving the authoritarian status quo.


Geopolitically, Jordan plays an important function to U.S. grand strategy as a critical part of its war-making infrastructure in the Middle East, as well as diplomatically a pro-Western oasis or island of stability in the heart of a "shatterbelt" of the Middle East. Because of these factors, Washington has very little problem providing such profuse amounts of military assistance to the Jordanian Armed Forces. Above all else, of course, Jordan abuts Israel. Jordan's role in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and its primary purpose as a peace partner of Israel validates in the eyes of many American policymakers why they should continue supporting the modernization and the arming of the Jordanian Armed Forces under the guise, of course, of building partner capacity but knowing full well that Jordan is not going to be fighting a war anytime soon.


RS: At some level, you've painted a picture of a big win for U.S. interests here. There's a sense in which America gets a huge plot of land in the middle of a region that it deems vital, and the only downside is that that support doesn't really square with our stated values. But in your article, you had a different conclusion. Can you tell me more about that?


Yom: By helping to maintain [Jordan's] political infrastructure, the United States is complicit in the continued economic and social stagnation of Jordan. For every dinar that the Jordanian leadership spends on security or military items — money that many Jordanians feel it does not have to spend — the less money there is to spend on, say, social programs or economic development.


If you look at the Jordanian economy, it is astounding how much of a crisis that it has fallen into. We're looking at, right now, 22 to 23 percent unemployment overall, which is probably a vast understatement of the real statistic. We're looking at nearly 50 percent youth unemployment. We're looking at poverty, which is between 25 to 30 percent depending upon which estimate we take as reliable. And this is all in a country that also spends approximately a third of each annual budget on military and security spending. So essentially, what you're looking at when you think about the Jordanian economy today is a wartime economy. The Jordanian government positions itself and maintains an army as if it were about to wage a war it doesn't have to wage, and that has a destructive effect on the economy and often justifies draconian security measures to regulate and police society. The United States, I would argue, is complicit in that arrangement.


Washington has had very similar experiences in the past with other countries where regimes have some kind of deep economic or political crisis, and yet they believe that having a well-armed coercive apparatus is going to immunize them from any sort of domestic unrest or popular overthrow. Now, that may be the case in Jordan, because the future is hard to tell. But that certainly wasn't the case in, say, Iran under the Shah. It wasn't the case in South Vietnam. It wasn't the case in some of our Central American client states in the 1970s and the 1980s.


One of the things I wish U.S. policymakers would reconsider is whether or not the current arrangement is fundamentally in the interest of the Jordanian people. If we define stability as a country having not just a legitimate political system, but a sustainable economy and a relatively satisfied population, then Jordan is failing on some of these key fronts.


History shows us that [this] kind of strategy seldom works, and it's one of the dark consequences that I fear the most in Jordan, since obviously instability in Jordan doesn't help anyone. But the current vision of stability that has encaged itself in the minds of American lawmakers is not one that I think is going to be fruitful over the long term.

The first maritime shipment of aid was offloaded from a barge to trucks in Gaza on March 15, part of a wider effort to bring more humanitarian aid into Gaza in coordination with the Israel Defense Forces.
The post First maritime humanitarian aid delivery to Gaza first appeared on FDD's Long War Journal.

The House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed four separate national security supplemental bills on Saturday, clearing the way for the foreign aid package to arrive at President Joe Biden's desk.One bill contained roughly $60 billion in aid for Ukraine, while a second had approximately $26 billion for Israel, and another gave $8 billion for the Indo-Pacific. A final one included a series of other policy priorities like the sale of TikTok and the REPO act that would allow the U.S. to seize Russian assets. The bills will now be rolled into one and are expected to be voted on in the Senate early next week.The Ukraine aid passed 311-112 with seven not voting and one member voting present. The Israel aid bill won 366-58 with seven not voting. The Indo-Pacific aid bill was advanced 385-34. The so-called "sidecar bill" that included the potential TikTok ban, passed 360-58. The more controversial of course were the bills funding the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, with members of the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively, raising concerns about continuing to fund these efforts. "'As much as it takes, as long as it takes' is not a mission statement, but a recipe for disaster," said Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) on X shortly before the vote. "Bad news does not get better with time. This is a plan to expand the war." Johnson did not get the majority of his party to support the Ukraine aid bill. In the end, 101 Republicans voted in favor, while 112 were opposed. Democrats, whose 210 voting members supported the aid unanimously, treated the result as a major victory. One member passed out Ukrainian flags on the House floor ahead of the vote, and celebrated its passage. "Ukraine aid passes!! Thank goodness. Hopefully this changes morale and results on the battlefield today Dark day for Putin," said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) on X. "Democrats waiving Ukrainian flags on the House floor tells you everything you need to know about their priorities," wrote Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.). "Ukraine first, America last."If the Senate, as expected, passes the package, it will mark the first tranche of aid to make its way through Congress since December 23, 2022. There was some bipartisan opposition on the Israel aid, with Republicans voting in favor by a margin of 193-21; Democrats supported the bill 173-37."We have seen how Prime Minister Netanyahu's government has used American weapons to kill indiscriminately, to force famine. Over 25,000 women and children dead. Tens of thousands of missiles and bombs levied on innocent civilians. We cannot escape what we see before us every day," said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) on the floor. "Are we going to participate in that carnage, or not? I choose not to."Nineteen progressives banded together in a letter to explain their vote to oppose the aid. They said Israel was violating U.S. laws that prevent the transfer of weapons to units that are violating human rights. "This is a moment of great consequence—the world is watching," the lawmakers wrote. "Today is, in many ways, Congress' first official vote where we can weigh in on the direction of this war. If Congress votes to continue to supply offensive military aid, we make ourselves complicit in this tragedy."Meanwhile, Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.), one of the GOP opponents to the legislation, said in a statement that his support for Israel remained "unshakeable" but that the aid for Israel should have been accompanied by domestic spending cuts. The House earlier passed an Israel aid bill that included cuts to the IRS, but it stalled in the Senate.

President Joe Biden plans to ask Congress for funding for Israel after Hamas' attack Oct. 7. Israel currently receives $3 billion to $4 billion a year in U.S. aid.

U.S. Air Force Tech Sgt. Eric Stevenson, a security forces raven, helps offload humanitarian aid en route to Gaza at an undisclosed airfield in the Middle East, Dec. 8, 2023.