PBS Special Report 📺: U.S. Foreign Aid
Featuring Unlock Aid and its partners, the PBS News Hour 3-part series describes the challenges & opportunities to transform U.S. foreign aid
Dear Unlock Aid community,
Last week, PBS News Hour aired a powerful three-part series called "Change Agents" that explored the critical need to transform how the U.S. spends approximately $60 billion every year to solve global challenges like pandemic preparedness, food security, and to boost sustainable economic growth.
The series featured Unlock Aid and several of our innovative coalition partners who are pioneering more effective, sustainable models in global development:
mPharma's Gregory Rockson demonstrated how his company is revolutionizing healthcare access across Africa through a network of hundreds of tech-enabled pharmacies and health centers across 9 countries. As Rockson explained: "It costs us $350 a month, including the salary we pay for the nurse, the fractional cost of the doctor, because the doctor doesn't have to be physically located at the site" – showing how innovative solutions like his can deliver higher quality health care at a fraction of traditional costs.
Eugene Boadu of mPedigree showed how their simple yet ingenious authentication system is eliminating the problem of counterfeit drugs, which claims approximately 500,000 lives per year in sub-Saharan Africa. Using mPedigree’s technology, "Nigeria has brought down its counterfeiting problem from somewhere around a staggering 65 percent to 70 percent, depending on the data you're looking at, to, last we checked, under 10 percent. And we think that should be the paradigm," Boadu explained, adding that this success could scale enormously if his company had access to international aid dollars.
Farmerline's Alloysius Attah has built a platform serving 2.2 million farmers across 50 countries, digitizing financial records and connecting them with vetted merchants for reliable seeds and inputs, while ensuring market access for their harvests. Despite this impressive scale, Attah describes how firms like his are often excluded from direct funding from donors like USAID and instead must subcontract to one of a handful of the agency’s biggest contractors. As Attah says, “It is exploitation. They get your content, they get your knowledge, not just your knowledge, the actual pictures to write the application, your videos, your impact reports," and then cut local innovators like Farmerline out of promised work. “We have experienced that like 1,000 times. And it's like — it's almost like you meet a girl and then you're very excited. The person leads you on, you pour your heart in, then they just, like, ghost you…”
Nikki Okrah's Chaku Foods is creating guaranteed markets for farmers while working to bring African produce to U.S. retailers like Trader Joe’s. As Okrah emphasized: "There's an abundance of wealth and opportunity above the land and in this space. We can have billions of dollars not going to waste and postharvest loss, but actually going to markets." Yet as the series highlights, very few aid dollars go to scale the impact of startups like Chaku Foods.
The entrepreneurs featured in the PBS series provide fresh insight into what a new vision for global development can look like. The timing of the PBS series also aligns well with an editorial published this weekend by Devex editor-in-chief Raj Kumar detailing his predictions for 2025 in global development. “Old Aid is a “melting iceberg,” he wrote. Increasingly, the “Old Aid” approach will be challenged by new actors and new models focused on promoting investment, innovation, and country-led platforms that drive sustainable economic growth.
As mPharma’s Gregory Rockson said on X: "We need more [foreign aid]. We need a different kind. We need one that focuses on results and not activities. We need one that focuses on systems change and not sloganeering. We need investments that expand the economic output of countries and not one that makes them aid dependent.”
Over the past three years, we've worked with hundreds of stakeholders to develop concrete proposals to fundamentally transform the U.S. approach to solving global challenges:
As our co-founder and co-executive director Walter Kerr told PBS, "You can look at some of the amazing organizations, entrepreneurs that are already active in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and deliberately identify them and begin to scale up their impact. They're out there."
To Progress,
Unlock Aid
Be sure to watch the PBS News Hour three-part series:
Episode 1: Where does U.S. foreign aid go and does it make an impact?
Episode 2: Is U.S. foreign aid for health care being used effectively?
Episode 3: U.S. aid leaves out local groups addressing food security in Africa, critics say