Broken Dreams

The little agency that didn’t.

The news about USAID this week is heartbreaking for me. For years, I worked with various bureaus in the agency that dealt with food aid, emergency response, child survival and other basic humanitarian assistance programmes. Now we know that much of what they did bore no resemblance to humanitarian assistance.

Time magazine claimed that “USAID funds projects in some 120 countries aimed at fighting epidemics, educating children, providing clean water and supporting other areas of development.”

USAID didn’t do any of those things. It was a procurement agency. It bought goods and services. There was never a USAID health service that fought epidemics. USAID never educated a single child, or drilled a single well. The actual organizations who did the work brought the expertise and hundreds of millions of dollars in co-funding. What USAID did do well was neocolonialism and cultural imperialism with their policy decisions and the financial retaliation that was implicit in many of their payments to countries.

As one who spent my non-partisan adult life working on the humanitarian aid frontlines, I feel betrayed as I explore the grant descriptions the agency provided funding for, now available in the bright sunshine for anyone who cares to see the truth.

I paid a very high personal price in pursuit of a dream that if enough of us who wanted to make the world a healthier, less hungry, more educated, more prosperous, less oppressive and more hopeful place, we could.

USAID betrayed those dreams.