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Strategic Objective
Promote Inclusive Economic Growth, Reduce Extreme Poverty, and Improve Food Security
Strategic Objective
Overview
Reducing extreme poverty and its causes has long been a central goal of the U.S. government’s development efforts. The Administration has prioritized inclusive economic growth and democratic governance as the only sustainable ways to accelerate development and eradicate extreme poverty. President Obama has called for the United States to “join with our allies to eradicate . . . extreme poverty in the next two decades.” Recent progress toward this goal is encouraging: since 2000, faster growth has led to falling aggregate poverty rates throughout the developing world, including sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Developing countries have cut their poverty rates in half in 10 years, with strong support from the United States and the international community.
Inclusive economic growth, in which all members of society benefit, can reduce political turmoil and conflict by stabilizing countries and regions. When the causes of poverty and hunger are addressed by helping youth gain access to economic opportunities, connecting people to the global economy, building resilience to economic and social stresses in conflict-prone societies, empowering women and minorities, and saving children from disease and preventable death, the United States and the world are stronger and more secure. As countries develop, they open their markets, become potential consumers of U.S. goods and services, and contribute to regional stability. To meet the goal of a world without extreme poverty, we continue to pay particular attention to the need for inclusive economic growth in fragile or conflict-affected states, where extreme poverty is likely to be concentrated in the coming decade and where growth can be uneven and volatile.
Through diplomacy and development programs, the Department of State and USAID encourage both governments and increasingly influential non-state actors to: demand and implement sound macroeconomic policy, good public financial management and accountability, and transparent and effective financial institutions and regulation; invest in public goods (like safe water and infrastructure); and establish an environment that permits the private sector, innovators, entrepreneurs, and civil society to flourish. We also encourage governments to work with civil society organizations, including labor organizations and business chambers. These groups have an important role as partners in development, influencing decisions regarding government resource allocation and the development agenda at the country level.
The Department of State and USAID can also play a critical role facilitating private sector engagement and private-public partnerships throughout the world. The private sector paves the way for reform efforts, creating bonds among people that foster a virtuous cycle of investment, growth, profits, and jobs in which everyone benefits.
We also support gender and minority integration and encourage governments to consider the impact of new policies on both men and women and majority and minority groups. This is a proven way to ensure that growth is inclusive and that it leads to better outcomes. We also support accessible quality education to reduce extreme poverty. An educated populace is healthier, more productive economically, and more active and empowered politically at all levels of society.
To help make countries more resilient in the face of shocks, USAID has developed Policy and Program Guidance to Building Resilience to Recurrent Crisis. This policy promotes resilience as an analytical, programmatic, and organizing concept to address the causes of chronic vulnerability and recurrent crisis. Greater resilience can help vulnerable communities emerge from cycles of crisis onto a pathway toward development.
Globally, 842 million people are chronically hungry. Climate change will make meeting the food and nutrition needs of a growing global population even more challenging. The resulting malnutrition can translate to a loss of as much as eight percent of a country’s gross domestic product. To tackle these food and nutrition security challenges, the U.S. government engages on policy, trade, investment, and development tracks – both bilaterally and through multilateral organizations such as the World Food Program. Through the Feed the Future Initiative, we work to increase agricultural productivity by partnering with governments, donor organizations, the private sector, and civil society. By focusing on small farmers, particularly women, we promote inclusive growth that increases incomes and reduces hunger, poverty, and under-nutrition. We also support food security goals through the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition and Partnerships for Growth.
External factors influence whether we attain our development goals. U.S. government development programs are typically only a small fraction of the economy in countries where we operate, so the political and economic environment inside a country is critical. Success is more likely when partner governments set a good policy and regulatory foundation for growth and improved public service delivery and encourage a vibrant private sector that invests and creates jobs. Events such as another global economic slowdown, political instability, conflict, drought, floods, and other natural disasters could all cause setbacks. In times of government austerity, donor resources can drop, making it more difficult to achieve development goals.
Strategies for Achieving the Objective
The world is coalescing around a goal to end extreme poverty by 2030, with growing optimism that this remarkable goal is within reach. The U.S. role is critical to ensuring continued global progress. American ingenuity is essential to solving the most complex development challenges that stand in the way of a world without extreme poverty.
The Department and USAID are making critical contributions toward achieving this goal. Ending extreme poverty requires enabling inclusive growth and promoting free, peaceful, and self-reliant societies that build human capital and create social safety nets for the poorest members of society, including women and other marginalized groups, such as people with disabilities, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people, and members of indigenous or ethnic minority groups. Engagement can open doors for development by resolving conflict, fostering political stability, and advocating development-friendly policies. U.S. government initiatives that increase food security, reduce deaths from preventable illness, and improve energy access address fundamental causes of poverty. USAID's work on education and resilience in the face of recurrent crisis is reaching millions in extreme poverty, and cross-cutting efforts on gender, governance, and climate are key to sustainability. USAID is also strongly positioned in the countries - many of them fragile - where extreme poverty affects the most people.
The Department and USAID promote inclusive growth through initiatives such as the African Women's Entrepreneurship Program (AWEP), which provides professional networking, business development, and trade capacity building opportunities for prominent women entrepreneurs across sub-Saharan Africa. AWEP includes an export readiness program, technical assistance, and access to capital. It empowers small-and-medium-sized African enterprises to capitalize on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, increasing trade regionally and with the United States. USAID’s Women’s Leadership Incentive Fund is also used annually to leverage Mission funding in support of women’s economic empowerment and female entrepreneurs are key participants in USAID’s worldwide economic growth projects. For example, using Leadership Funds, women in Bangladesh will be empowered to lead on employment and labor reform in the apparel sector, a crucial arena for promoting inclusive economic growth.
USAID's Policy Framework features eight interrelated development objectives: (1) increase food security; (2) promote global health and health systems; (3) reduce the impact of climate change and promote low emissions growth; (4) promote sustainable, broad-based economic growth; (5) expand and sustain the ranks of stable, prosperous, and democratic states; (6) provide humanitarian assistance and support disaster mitigation; (7) prevent and respond to crises, conflict, and instability; and (8) improve lives through learning and education. Poverty is multi-dimensional, and elements of each of these eight objectives are essential to address the causes and consequences of extreme poverty and promote inclusive growth.
USAID is establishing a new development model that focuses on creating public-private partnerships and harnessing science, technology, and innovation to deliver measurable results. The new model is grounded in the reality that political leadership and policy reform are essential preconditions to driving investment to the regions and sectors where it has the biggest impact on reducing extreme poverty and ending the most devastating consequences of child hunger and child death. This approach requires integrated diplomatic and development efforts as we seek policy reform and promote investment and responsible business conduct in complex and transitional environments.
Read Less...Progress Update
In his 2013 State of the Union Address, President Obama laid out a challenge—to governments, organizations and individuals—to end extreme poverty in the next two decades. Feed the Future has made strong progress toward this goal, including leading a global reinvestment in agriculture, designing and implementing modern development assistance programs aligned to country-led strategies in focus countries, establishing a rigorous analytical base, developing a research strategy, and launching innovative public-private partnerships. The 2014 Feed the Future Progress Report demonstrates that we are starting to see results from this work.
Even with these successes, the U.S. government has encountered challenges. The Feed the Future Results Framework is ambitious and has raised the bar on the rigor agencies expect from themselves, their implementing partners, and partner countries. To be sustainable, the monitoring and evaluation framework must use data from partner country sources for certain indicators; however, the quality and availability of data vary widely across countries. To address this, the U.S. government is engaging in capacity-building efforts with partner government institutions and supporting the implementation of the United Nations Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics.
Achieving widespread adoption of modernized farming practices and agricultural technologies in Feed the Future-focus countries is particularly difficult among the most resource-poor farmers. Higher poverty levels tend to correlate with higher risk aversion among smallholders, making it less likely that they will use new methods and invest in new technologies. Therefore, Feed the Future is building an evidence base on what works and identifying how we will support partner country policymakers in advancing policy reforms critical to increasing technology use. These actions support the country-led processes in Feed the Future-focus countries and, in Africa, will advance the efforts of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (for additional information on the progress of the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, see the 2013-2014 Progress Report).
Recognizing that inequalities between men and women farmers’ access to productive inputs constrain agricultural productivity, Feed the Future strives to ensure greater gender equality and women’s empowerment through its programming. Although there has been progress in reaching individual female farmers and in developing a robust monitoring framework, the data in the Progress Report show uneven success in empowering women’s organizations and creating policy change.
As the U.S. government addresses these and other challenges, the current test is not only to sustain progress, but to improve and accelerate our efforts. To get there, the U.S. government must continue to work smarter—challenging assumptions and building our evidence base, pursuing innovative partnerships, breaking down ineffective organizational boundaries, linking relief to development, and scaling up innovation and private investment to spur agricultural growth.
Strengthening Gender Integration in Development Programming:
In July 2014, Secretary Kerry issued policy guidance on “Promoting Gender Equality and Advancing the Status of Women and Girls” which, along with existing Department guidance and USAID’s Gender Equality and Female Empowerment Policy (GE/FE), provides direction on promoting gender equality in service of national security and foreign policy objectives. Complimentary in scope, both policies require that gender equality be incorporated into U.S. foreign policy and assistance development, strategic and budget planning, implementation of policies and programs, management and training, and monitoring and evaluation of results. In addition, the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, the U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence Globally, and Ending Child Marriage and Meeting the Needs of Married Children: The USAID Vision for Action all provide additional strategic direction for engagement. USAID also issued Automated Directives System (ADS) Chapter 205, a standalone chapter on gender integration that operationalizes and provides concrete direction on how to carry out the mandates of the GE/FE Policy. Both the Department and USAID have made significant progress in overall efforts to integrate gender in all aspects of diplomatic, development, and operational efforts, including:
Integrating a focus on gender across all diplomatic and development engagement:
The Department of State and USAID work to ensure that gender equality and women’s issues are fully integrated into the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy and development programming. The Department’s Full Participation Fund (FP Fund) supports innovative efforts by bureaus and posts to integrate gender into their overall efforts, including their operations and programming. The FP Fund offers posts and bureaus the opportunity to demonstrate how gender can be integrated into the day-to-day foreign policy-making process of the U.S., while crafting programs that directly promote empowerment of women and girls abroad.
Implementing U.S. strategic initiatives related to gender-based violence and women, peace, and security:
The Department and USAID both provide staff and implementing partners with guidance on how to execute U.S. strategic priorities identified in the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security, and U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence Globally. Both the Department and USAID also support stand-alone programs to address Gender-based Violence (GBV) across the globe. For example, through the Full Participation fund, Embassy Guinea, will launch a new partnership with the Government of Guinea and other multilateral and civil society actors to eliminate female genital mutilation (FGM/C) in eight districts– impacting up to 65,000 girls. Using GBV Incentive Funds, USAID/Haiti will strengthen GBV survivor-centered services and referral pathways through improving institutional capacity, while also preventing future instances of GBV through bolstering community resilience and opening up economic opportunities to reduce the vulnerability of survivors. For more information regarding progress results on the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace, and Security and U.S. Strategy to Prevent and Respond to Gender-based Violence Globally, please refer to each strategy’s annual implementation reports.
Building staff capacity through gender training:
To ensure that all staff has capacity to integrate gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls effectively in their work, both State and USAID have expanded training opportunities on gender. In particular, USAID requires staff who design, evaluate, or manage strategies and projects, or who directly or indirectly supervise these staff, to receive basic gender training by taking the online course Gender 101. Over 4,000 people have already completed this course. Gender 102 and Gender 103 are also now available to all staff online. These courses focus on describing USAID’s requirements related to gender integration and providing staff with concrete examples and methodological tools to build the skills required to carry out these mandates. Sector-specific, in-person gender courses (e.g., in Democracy and Governance, Global Health, conflict, human trafficking) have also been designed and delivered. Similarly, through the Foreign Service Institute, the Department offers both a classroom course and distance learning course on promoting gender equality, and is working to integrate a focus on gender equality in relevant regional, tradecraft, and leadership courses.
Incorporating gender-based analysis into program design and decision-making:
USAID requires that gender analysis be carried out and the results incorporated into the design of all projects. For example, USAID understands that reducing gender inequality and recognizing the contribution of women to agriculture is critical to achieving global food security. As a result, Feed the Future integrates gender-based analysis into all of its investments. New analytical tools, like the Women's Empowerment in Agriculture Index equip USAID with the means to identify ways to help women overcome obstacles and constraints. A major accomplishment in this area is the 2014 Global Report on the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index. This report included comprehensive, empirical analysis baseline measures of women’s empowerment for 13 Feed the Future countries. Feed the Future aims to strategically apply these findings to further inform gender integration efforts in programming.
Resilience to Recurrent Crisis:
In late 2011 and early 2012, building resilience to recurrent crisis emerged as a USAID priority. Large-scale droughts in 2011-2012 once again underscored the costs of not addressing the underlying causes of recurrent crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel. These include the humanitarian costs measured in lost lives, livelihoods, dignity, and aspiration, as well as the developmental costs to national and regional economies. For example, unfettered drought in Kenya between 2008 and 2011 is estimated to have cost the Kenyan economy $12 billion. It also includes the economic costs of repeatedly responding to these crises with humanitarian assistance as attested to by the $1.5 billion the U.S. government spent in responding to humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa and Sahel in 2011-2012 alone. Together with its development partners, USAID is committed to the shared goal of building resilience to get ahead of chronic crisis, protect and advance development gains, and make populations around the world less vulnerable to inevitable shocks.
In FY 2014, USAID launched the Global Resilience Partnership (Resilience Partnership), a new Public/Private Partnership between USAID, the Swedish International Development Coordination Agency (SIDA), and the Rockefeller Foundation. The Resilience Partnership aims to help millions of vulnerable people in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and South and Southeast Asia better adapt to shocks and chronic stresses and invest in a more secure future. Specific goals of the partnership include, (1) developing new models for accessing, integrating, and using data and information; (2) increasing the ability of people, communities, systems, and countries to forecast, manage, and adapt to a variety of risks; (3) developing new evidence-based tools and approaches to align key actors, and prioritize and scale-up resilience investments and innovations; (4) engaging a range of actors, including the private sector, to pioneer resilience-building products, leverage resilience investments, and build local capacity; and, (5) promoting more effective integration of development and humanitarian resources to directly address underlying vulnerabilities. As its first activity, the Resilience Partnership launched a Global Resilience Challenge, which called for multi-sectoral teams to collaborate on innovative solutions to the toughest resilience challenges in the three focus regions.
In FY 2014, USAID continued to support efforts to build resilience to recurrent crisis in vulnerable, dry-land areas in the Horn of Africa and Sahel. These efforts support country-led strategies and aim to sustainably expand economic opportunities on and off farms, strengthen natural resource, conflict and disaster risk management, and improve health, nutrition, and human capital. Illustrative achievements from these efforts include nearly a quarter of a million hectares of land under improved Natural Resource Management during the first year of consolidated resilience-building efforts in Niger and Burkina Faso, improved access to year round water sources for more than 163,000 people in the drought-impacted drylands of Ethiopia, the expansion of livestock insurance services in Ethiopia and Kenya, and strengthened Drought Cycle and Disaster Risk Management in 145 communities in northern Kenya that were impacted by the 2011 drought. USAID’s continued efforts to build resilience in the Horn of Africa reached an estimated 3.8 million people in FY 2014. The more recent launch of USAID’s resilience efforts in the Sahel will build on foundational Food for Peace development programs and Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance Disaster Risk Reduction investments and reach an estimated 1.9 million people.
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Strategic Goals
Strategic Goal:
Strengthen America’s Economic Reach and Positive Economic Impact
