Introducing the Global Innovation Agenda
The U.S. needs to offer the world a new and better value proposition to address the greatest challenges that face us
Dear Unlock Aid community,
The United States is the world’s largest funder for global development, spending approximately $60 billion every year to help other countries do things like adapt to a changing climate and build stronger health and education systems.
But as our Follow the Money investigation illustrates, most of that money goes right into the pockets of the post World War II-era “aid industrial complex,” which has a spotty record of achievement at best.
While full of well-intentioned people, the aid industry too often causes harm by displacing local markets, creating brain drain, and perpetuating legacies of paternalism and colonialism.
A global innovation agenda can change that
In 2023, Unlock Aid went on a 6-month listening tour to ask hundreds of organizations and communities in the U.S. and around the world what a new U.S. approach to global development could look like. We spoke with political leaders, diaspora communities, socially-responsible businesses, entrepreneurs, philanthropists, faith leaders, impact investors, and many more. Informed by those discussions, we developed a new set of principles for global development.
The U.S. could offer the world a new value proposition to address the greatest challenges that face us, present and future, domestic and global:
The U.S. could make sustainable, broad-based economic growth and mutually-beneficial trade, not aid, the basis of its relationship with hundreds of nations around the world, seeding new industries and opportunities we cannot yet imagine. A growing body of evidence shows that investing along these lines does more to boost human and social development outcomes than do one-off aid projects. While the U.S. should continue to meet humanitarian, human rights and democracy needs, most of the countries the U.S. government provides development assistance are ready to transition their relationships away from aid-based models to ones focused on promoting broad-based sustainable economic growth.
The U.S. could position itself as a natural partner for any country that wants to leverage innovation and grow strategic sectors to advance their development priorities. For example, the U.S. could regularly sponsor competitions akin to Operation Warp Speed to incentivize industry investments to solve challenges where markets won’t otherwise act, invest globally in R&D centers and in critical sectors to boost employment and create jobs of the future, and provide capital to scale up proven technologies and other innovations that solve the world’s hardest problems.
The U.S. could change how it invests globally. It could cease using project- and traditional aid-based approaches that don’t work in favor of models like compacts, joint ventures, and direct investment that deliver results and promote sustainability and country and community ownership.
Now, in the final nine months of this term of the Biden-Harris Administration and the 118th Congress, we’re calling on our elected leaders to introduce and pass a set of bills that translate those principles into action.
Together, this package of reforms make up what we call the Global Innovation Agenda:
As flagship legislation, we need a Global Development for the Future Act to transform our outdated global development architecture and make investments in sustainable economic growth innovation part and parcel with the way the United States partners with other countries and communities around the world.
Congress should also pass the Locally Led Development and Humanitarian Act to ensure that more resources reach local communities; the Fostering Innovation in Global Development Act to scale public funding for the most cost effective, replicable, and proven innovations in global development; and a USAID Prime Contractor Accountability for Results Act to put more sunlight on the aid industry’s biggest players to ensure they devolve more funding to the next-generation innovators and local communities.
Click here to sign your name to a growing list of individuals and organizations who endorse the Global Innovation Agenda. We’ll be sharing the list of endorsing organizations with lawmakers who want big changes. They need to know that we have their back.
To Progress,
Unlock Aid
P.S. We will be attending the Skoll World Forum next week. We are hosting a gathering to share updates on our campaign to shift U.S. public funding to support social innovators worldwide. If you would like to join us, please RSVP here.
I support what you're doing, but hooo boy, sometimes it really feels like you're reinventing the wheel.. Or maybe you just haven't studied the last 20 years of development discourse in the USA. "Trade not aid"? Like that hasn't been flogged A TON. Innovation agenda - have you looked at the mid 2010s under Obama. Longer term, trustbased program investments rather than projects? Are you aware of the MCC?