Word: usaid
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...plethora of reform, development and exchange programs conducted by contractors and nonprofit organizations, many funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), fall in between. USAID’s West Bank/Gaza budget of $225 million, which includes providing equipment for Palestinian schools, micro-finance loans for entrepreneurs, and rule-of-law forums for Palestinian judges, is being reassessed by the Bush administration with the intent of cutting off any aid that could benefit the Palestinian government...
...addition, curtailing or canceling these programs would weaken Hamas’s adversaries, not Hamas. Organizations receiving USAID funding are the closest thing to allies that America has in the West Bank and Gaza; they already sign a pledge that they will not support terror organizations or terrorists. America should redouble its efforts to strengthen these groups, not abandon them...
...their democratic choice. Cutting aid to NGOs and entrepreneurs in the West Bank and Gaza before the Hamas government takes any meaningful action would be a thinly-veiled attempt to retaliate against Palestinians for choosing Hamas over Fatah. Maher Awartani, a Palestinian-American youth participation specialist at a USAID-funded project in Ramallah, rightly notes that cutting such funding in response to the recent elections would demonstrate to Palestinians that the U.S. is “punishing us for...pure indigenous democratic practice...
Whatever the appropriate relationship between politics and aid, the U.S. should not use its aid to subvert democracy. A troubling precedent was set just before the legislative council election, when USAID expedited several programs (and suppressed its own publicity requirements) in order to allow Fatah to take credit for last-minute municipal improvements. To channel money to one side in a democratic election, and then to cut off funding when the other side wins—whether motivated by genuine disgust, or by the desire to precipitate the Hamas government’s collapse and reverse the election?...
...USAID signs in the West Bank and Gaza portray American aid as a “gift from the American people to the Palestinian people.” If that aid is conditional on the way Palestinians vote, it is less a gift than a bribe...