Word: usaid
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...year-old daughter. And securing jobs for the hundreds of thousands of unemployed is a long-term goal for the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. But St. Leger is skeptical when asked about the estimated $2.2 billion reportedly spent in postearthquake Haiti - with about $780 million spent by USAID and Department of Defense humanitarian aid. "If they've spent billions of dollars," she says, "I haven't seen it. We are living here day to day. We are bathing in dirt when it rains...
...selling at $75 a kg, a long way down from the peak of $250 a kilo in 2003. Even so, the farmers turned down subsidized wheat seed and fertilizer, believing opium would be more profitable. They were wrong. When the next crop was harvested, says Rory Donohoe, a USAID official in Lashkar Gah, Helmand's provincial capital, "some wheat farmers made more than poppy farmers." That's because opium poppy is a high-maintenance plant and costs five times as much to grow as wheat. Poppy is also expensive to harvest, requiring many laborers, who must scour each poppy...
...Gates' insistence on the need for bigger State Department budgets hasn't hurt. In fact, relations with the Pentagon have gone smoother, at times, than Clinton's relationship with the White House staff. Clinton was particularly irritated by the ridiculously strict vetting process that thwarted her favored candidate for USAID director, Paul Farmer, from getting the job. "It was all sorts of niggling things," says a Clinton adviser, "like, Farmer had at one point brought more than $10,000 in cash into Haiti. The money was for a needle-exchange program, but the amount was illegal...
Nawaz says USAID needs to work directly with local NGOs in identifying and designing projects that local communities will "own" and sustain. That, however, would require far more manpower than USAID currently has; over the years, funding cuts have eviscerated it down to little more than a contract-management agency. USAID officials, who did not make themselves available for this article, told Congress this past summer that they are rapidly staffing up for Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the agency may soon have its biggest footprint since Vietnam. Currently the dependence on highly paid consultants means at least half of every...
...Council on Foreign Relations. "Too much of the money has never reached its intended target but stayed here in America to pay salaries or fund overhead in contracts." Ironically perhaps, one of the best things Clinton can do is to rebuild and finally install new leadership at USAID so it has a better chance of being able to handle all the money that's about to flow to crucial places like Pakistan...