Adam Davidson argued that a better way to implement foreign aid is through closer collaboration with recipient countries to identify needs and the use of a venture-capital approach to fund solutions.
The column criticizes the United States government for not helping Haitian farmers export mangoes in 2010, but it ignores the 25,000 Haitian mango farmers we’ve trained and the nearly 500 tons of mangoes they have sold to Whole Foods stores to date. We helped Haitians accomplish this through the results-based principles of local partnership that the column argues for us to adopt.
In the 50 years that the United States Agency for International Development has helped save people threatened by humanitarian disasters and extreme poverty, we have re-evaluated our approaches. Today we partner with local governments, civil society, inventors and the private sector. The Global Development Lab harnesses innovative ideas, including the venture-capital approach commended by the column. We conduct rigorous evaluations and collect publicly available data so that thinkers everywhere can hone our work.
This approach helped U.S.A.I.D. win the No.1 ranking among federal agencies, for using a results-based approach to our work, in the 2015 Index by the nonprofit organization Results for America.