Foreign Aid That Works

It is hardly a secret that too many U.S. global aid dollars have disappeared into political rat holes, mainly the pockets of autocrats and their corrupt buddies. The best response, however, is not to get out of the aid business but to direct the money to programs that work.

Two pending bills in Congress would do that. One would help eradicate tuberculosis; the other establish “microcredit” programs, small loans to village collectives that bypass corrupt governments and offer aid to the hard-working poor.

The TB bill, introduced Thursday by Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), would triple funding to fight tuberculosis, from $75 million to $200 million, and ensure that all of the money would go toward cost-effective programs. The Boxer/Smith bill is a healthy antidote to a Bush administration proposal that would actually reduce TB and malaria funding by one-third next year.

Now is not the time for such a reduction. Although tuberculosis has become the leading killer of young women and of people with AIDS worldwide, only one in four people it afflicts currently have access to proven, effective treatment. And as Boxer puts it, because the bacterium is easily spread through the air, “TB anywhere is a threat everywhere.... It’s just a plane ride away in our highly mobile world.”

The second bill, now being crafted by Rep. Tim Roemer (D-Ind.), would earmark $200 million in annual aid for the sort of successful “microcredit” programs that Jordan’s Queen Rania al Abdullah described Friday in Mexico at a summit on world poverty. Among them are programs in the Sahel region of Africa just below the Sahara that help women prepare baked goods during the “hungry season” between harvests, Save the Children programs in Afghanistan that since 1995 have helped women make carpets and sew and sell clothing, and “village banking” collectives worldwide in which 20 to 40 members, mostly or all women, make short-term loans to people they know and whom they can help to ensure that borrowers are successful enough to repay the village bank with interest. Roemer’s bill, wise to the grabby tactics of many larger banks, would restrict the funding to ensure that most of it gets to the very poor.

TB, AIDS and malaria kill about 15,000 people every day, deepening world poverty. About 1.3 billion people worldwide live on less than $1 a day. As Queen Rania pointed out at the summit in Mexico, these dual economic and health disasters have created a “fertile breeding ground for desperation,” a climate in which “terrorism often takes root.”

Foreign aid alone is not a cure for terrorism--the world isn’t that simple. But these small and focused proposals by Sens. Boxer and Gordon and Rep. Roemer would be sound investments in a more stable world.