| Posted February 12, 2007
Development Assistance & Foreign Aid
| Health, HIV/AIDS & Infectious Diseases | Humanitarian Assistance
H1 - A New Direction for U.S. Foreign Assistance
Tobias, Randall L.
CSIS, February 5th, 2007, online edition
The Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project (PCR) at CSIS hosted Ambassador Randall L. Tobias, director of U.S. foreign assistance and administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Ambassador Randall L. Tobias gave a speech titled, "Foreign Assistance: A Strategic New Direction." Ambasssador Randall's Speech
H2 - Making Aid Work
Mark Sundberg, Alan Gelb
Finance & Development, Dec 2006, v43, #4, pp14-18
"Since 1960 nearly $650 billion in aid has been provided to sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) countries. Total aid to SSA from rich countries represents the bulk of reported net financial flows to the continent, accounting for between 40% and 90% in any given year since 1970. Aid has often been criticized for flowing to dictators and corrupt regimes with little interest in national development. But changes since the mid-1990s hold clear promise for improving aid quality and effectiveness. The harmonization and alignment of aid under the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, as well as the trend toward improved aid allocation selectivity on the basis of need and policy quality, provide evidence of this. This new aid architecture can be simply described as aligning aid with country-owned poverty reduction strategies to finance priority social and infrastructural investments, conditional on delivering measurable results." Mark Sundberg is a Lead Economist, and Alan Gelb is Director of Development Policy, at the World Bank. Fulltext
H3 - Be My Guest Worker
Philip, Martin
American Interest, Jan/Feb 2007, v2, #3, pp32-41
"Genuinely new ideas are rare in international political life, particularly new ideas that happen also to be good ideas. One such prospective new idea has been slowly rising and has recently taken on protean aspirations. That idea is to expand international labor migration as a means not only to boost economies in the developed world, but also in the developing world, especially through the expansion of remittances (money sent by migrant workers to relatives in their home countries). The hope, too, is that by expanding legal migration, illegal migration, with its host of public health and security liabilities, can be sharply reduced. This new 'big idea' has come to be characterized as a 'win-win-win' proposition: Migrants win by earning higher wages; recipient countries win with additional workers to expand their own productivity and affluence; and sending countries win through remittances and the return of workers who have gained skills abroad. If this big new idea sounds almost too good to be true, it’s because it is." Philip Martin is professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, chair of the UC Comparative Immigration and Integration Program, and editor of Migration News. Order article
H4 - The Challenge of Global Health
Garrett, Laurie
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007, online edition
Thanks to a recent extraordinary rise in public and private giving, today more money is being directed toward the world's poor and sick than ever before. But unless these efforts start tackling public health in general instead of narrow, disease-specific problems -- and unless the brain drain from the developing world can be stopped -- poor countries could be pushed even further into trouble, in yet another tale of well-intended foreign meddling gone awry. Laurie Garrett is Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health. Fulltext
H5 - How to Promote Global Health: A Foreign Affairs Roundtable
Foreign Affairs, January/February 2007, online edition
In this special Web feature, Paul Farmer, Jeffrey Sachs, Alex de Waal, Roger Bate & Kathryn Boateng, and Laurie Garrett discuss Garrett's essay "The Challenge of Global Health" and debate how best to help the world's poor and sick. Fulltext
H6 - Evolved for Cancer?
Zimmer, Carl
Scientific American; January 2007, v296 #1, pp68-75
"The article focuses on the evolution of cancer. The author looks at how evolution has played a role in the maintenance of the disease. Research cited suggests that since some cancer cells increase the likelihood of propagation among species, genetic coding within mammals promote the development of cancer and tumor growth. An analysis of the role of anticancer proteins is also provided." Carl Zimmer writes frequently about evolution for the New York Times, National Geographic and other publications. Fulltext
H7 - Aids Vaccines: The Next Frontiers
AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition (AVAC), Web posted December
29, 2006, 60p
The next two years are critical for the AIDS vaccine field. Many research trials will have been completed which means information will become available to support collaboration on how to handle the new challenges being offered and how to map out future pathways. An infusion of new funds will stimulate product development as well as provide opportunities to explore issues of access and delivery. The report outlines nine items that AVAC feels are most important to AIDS vaccine delivery. Fulltext
H8 -More Than One Way of Dying
Hollenbach, David
America, Jan 15-Jan 22, 2007, v196, #2, pp15-19
"More than 33 Million refugees and internally displaced people
languish in the world today. A disproportionate percentage of
them live in Africa. Most have been driven from their homes by
armed strife. Such displacement is often overlooked in discussions
of the duty to protect civilians in warfare. Killing civilians
counts as a violation of the law of war, but uprooting millions
of people from their homes is not often counted among war's injustices.
The conditions in which forcibly displaced people are typically
compelled to live, however, violate their basic human rights.
One can ask whether these conditions are not nearly as bad as
death itself." Abebe Feyissa, an Ethiopian refugee, raised
this question powerfully at a conference on advocacy for the rights
of refugees recently sponsored in Nairobi, Kenya. David Hollenbach,
S.J., is director of the Center for Human Rights and International
Justice and Flatley Professor of Theology at Boston College. Fulltext
H9 - The Making, and Unmaking, of a Child Soldier
Beah, Ishmael
New York Times Magazine, Jan 14, 2007, pp36-47
This article presents the story of the recruitment of a 12-year-old Sierra Leone boy to fight against the rebel army known as the Revolutionary United Front. The rebels had raided his village and killed his parents and two brothers before he was recruited to fight the rebels. He joined a group that was comprised of many other boys and they spent the next several years fighting and killing every day,. One day he and some other boys were turned over to UNICEF to be reindoctrinated as boys. Ismael Beah is the author of "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier," from which this article is adapted. Fulltext
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