Obama Administration

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February 1, 2012 | 9:21 AM | By

Report: Obama’s Global Health Initiative lacks initiative, clear strategy

A new report by the Center for Global Development‘s Nandini Oomman and Rachel Silverman says that the Obama Administration’s once much-celebrated (though always vague) Global Health Initiative appears to suffer from a severe case of bureaucratic anemia:

At its launch, the GHI was met with great excitement and showed much promise as a coordinating mechanism to streamline U.S. global health funding and improve aid effectiveness. Thus far, however, the initiative has been plagued by problems with transparency, leadership, coordination, funding, and implementation, leading to deep skepticism both within and outside the U.S. government.

You can read their short, incisive report here as a PDF.

Oomman and Silverman don’t just whine about it. They present options to help GHI ‘regain the promise it held’ beginning with getting past vague generalities to clarify what it is and how it is supposed to work .

CGD colleague Connie Veillette also weighs in with Where Oh Where has the GHI Gone? The Whole of Government Approach Hangs in the Balance.

Veillette partly blames the lack of initiative and confusion at GHI on the political jockeying now plaguing our approach to foreign aid due to infighting between Sec. Hillary Clinton’s folks at the U.S. State Department and Raj Shah’s gang at the U.S. Agency for International Aid over ‘reforming’ foreign aid. Here’s my own, semi-serious, look at the tussle back when it started in early 2010.

Also see Global Post’s series on the Global Health Initiative over the past year.

FILED UNDER: Health, Politics, Global Health Initiative, Nandini Oomman, Obama Administration
January 6, 2012 | 10:59 AM | By

News flash: Global health continues to stagnate under Obama

The Kaiser Family Foundation yesterday held a briefing on the Obama Administration’s ‘new’ approach to global health featuring, as keynote speaker, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sibelius.

Nothing much of substance seems to have happened, which some will say is in keeping with the Obama Administration’s strategy for global health. Sibelius claimed that the U.S. has always been and is today a leader in the fight against diseases of poverty, quoting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:

“At a time when people are raising questions about America’s role in the world, our leadership in global health reminds them who we are and what we do.”

True enough. America has been a leader in many aspects of global health, such as the fight against AIDS and malaria. But none of that lead was established by the Obama Administration. It was mostly President George W. Bush’s leadership (especially on AIDS in Africa) — and to a great extent a small, private operation based in Seattle run by a software tycoon — which gave us the lead.

The Obama Administration, as documented in this excellent series of articles (also funded by Kaiser) in GlobalPost called Healing the World, hasn’t really accomplished much of anything … besides a lot of talk, new reports and announced ‘new’ shifts in strategy.

You can see for yourself, if you want to watch Kaiser’s video of the two-hour Beltway confab:

Two news organizations tried to cover the Kaiser event but I don’t know what they said since both, Congressional Quarterly and Politico Pro, are hidden behind a subscriber paywall. Kaiser quoted from one of the reports, by CQ’s Rebecca Adams:

“The strategy identifies 10 major objectives but does not include metrics for gauging success,” the news service writes, adding Sebelius “said the plan ‘does not represent a radical new direction but seeks to provide a focus to ongoing efforts.”

That doesn’t really sound new, or maybe even like much of a strategy. Most folks seem to have stopped paying much attention to the Obama Administration’s global health strategy — because it seems like mostly just rhetoric with no new funding and little in the way of substantive action.

 

FILED UNDER: Health, Global Health Initiative, GlobalPost, Kaiser Family Foundation, Obama Administration
August 29, 2011 | 8:30 AM | By

Libya: Making the case for humanitarian warfare?

Flickr, Runs with Scissors

Gandhi and Che, two kinds of freedom fighters

On CNN’s Global Public Square blog, Stewart Patrick writes that the U.S. military’s support of the popular revolution in Libya and its defeat of Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi vindicates the Obama Administration’s decision to engage in warfare on humanitarian grounds.

Patrick, who is a senior fellow at Foreign Affairs and director of the Program on International Institutions and Global Governance for the Council on Foreign Relations, notes that this was the “first unambiguous military enforcement of the Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. Writes Patrick:

The fall of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is a significant foreign policy triumph for U.S. President Barack Obama. By setting overall strategy while allowing others to shoulder the burden of implementing it, the Obama administration achieved its short-term objective of stopping Gadhafi’s atrocities and its long-term one of removing him from power. This was all done at a modest financial cost, with no U.S. troops on the ground, and zero U.S. casualties. Meanwhile, as the first unambiguous military enforcement of the Responsibility to Protect norm, Gadhafi’s utter defeat seemingly put new wind in the sails of humanitarian intervention.

I’ve raised this issue a few times on Humanosphere, including this post in mid-March immediately after the Obama Administration decided to intervene. I also noted an argument for intervention by Robert Pape in The Atlantic and later posted on the ongoing and, to me, somewhat confusing debate about what kind of humanitarian crisis justifies military intervention.

Patrick regards the decision to intervene in Libya as a justified but unique exercise of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine — aka, the humanitarian case for warfare. Many will disagree with both characterizations.

As Patrick notes, many will see Libya as a dangerous precedent encouraging “interventionism run amok.” Others, looking at the Syrian government’s ongoing killing of democracy protesters, will see any argument against intervening there as a dangerous ambivalence.

FILED UNDER: Politics, humanitarian, Libya, military, Obama, Obama Administration, Stewart Patrick
August 25, 2011 | 10:43 AM | By

GlobalPost: Obama’s Global Health Initiative shuns abortion services

The online international news organization GlobalPost has been taking an in-depth look at the Obama Administration’s Global Health Initiative (GHI) as part of its new endeavor, Global Pulse.

Managed and sometimes written by John Donnelly, one of the best global health journalists out there, I dare say the Global Pulse series is probably the most comprehensive, on-the-ground look at what the Administration is doing to fight disease in the developing world.

Here’s one of the their latest posts, by Hanna Ingber Win entitled GHI’s Missing Piece in Nepal, about the problems caused by the ongoing prohibition of U.S. foreign aid funding of abortion services.

Hanna Ingber Win, Global Post

Win opens her post:

LAMAHI, Nepal – United States President Barack Obama set up the Global Health Initiative to take a more comprehensive approach to improving health care in developing nations. In particular, his administration has given great weight to saving the lives of women and to supporting countries’ priorities in health care.

But there’s one exception: abortion.

In Nepal, that exclusion is in plain view, and many say the lack of support disregards evidence that safe abortions can save women’s lives. Nearly all experts here — with the notable exception of those employed by the U.S. government — publicly state that the best way to improve maternal health is by offering a wide range of services that includes more awareness about and access to safe abortion.

 

FILED UNDER: Health, abortion, Global Health Initiative, Global Pulse, maternal health, Nepal, Obama Administration
August 8, 2011 | 11:50 AM | By

Let’s bring about world peace while Tom Paulson is gone for two weeks

Updated with new information at 6 p.m. August 8th, 2011

Since Tom Paulson is going to be away on vacation for a full two weeks, I thought I would tackle some of the major problems we face today, starting with world peace. That way, when Tom returns he’ll have fewer tasks and can focus on other issues like health, justice, science, etc.

Besides, I think the role of wars on the entire humanosphere needs much more examination.

Some of you may think I’m being a little ambitious. Well, maybe so. Just keep in mind that I’m trying to help out Tom. Besides, if we really put in some real effort, world peace shouldn’t be that hard. It’s what we all want. It’s what every world leader calls for. In fact, since President Obama already has won the Nobel Peace Prize, world peace would be a way to live up to the award, right?

And, the United States, even though it couldn’t qualify for a revolving charge card at Sears right now, is still the world’s one-and-only superpower. With that clout, I would think we could bring about world peace. For the sake of expediency, and brevity of this post, I’ll just say that it does seem we are moving in the right direction. The United States has pledged to pull all troops out of Iraq this year, and we could do the same in Afghanistan by next year, surely. (Let me know if you think there is a problem with my expedient/brevity thinking here.)

Wikimedia Creative Commons photo

Damage after the Israeli bombing of Gaza in 2008.

With Iraq and Afghanistan at peace, where then could the United States turn its tremendous peace-making powers next? I think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems like a good candidate. Leaders of violent opposition groups in the Middle East, from Iraq to Syria to Lebanon have told me that solving this conflict would go a long way in bringing peace to the entire region.

Some people think that gaining recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations will lead to peace. The International Middle East Media Center, developed in collaboration between Palestinian and international journalists to provide independent media coverage of Israel-Palestine, said Monday:

“Palestinian sources reported that President Mahmoud Abbas will be visiting Lebanon in the middle of this month as he accepted an official invitation from the Lebanese president, Michael Suleiman Aoun. Lebanon will be heading the UN security Council in September. The sources added that Abbas will be in Lebanon on August 16th and 17th, and that his visit will focus on the Palestinian UN move this coming September that aims at an international recognition of an independent state in addition to a full membership at the UN and its security council.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, foreign aid, foreign policy, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama Administration, peace, United Nations
June 10, 2011 | 11:34 AM | By

Last big push in advance of the vaccine summit, on blogs and British media anyway

UNICEF

A shot at life

On Monday, at a big international conference in London focused on expanding global access to childhood vaccinations, one of the big questions is if the Obama Administration will step up with the U.S. share of the funding.

Nearly two million children in poor countries die annually from mundane vaccine-preventable diseases that children in wealthy nations don’t die from. Vaccines are cheap, compared to most health interventions, and can cheaply save millions of lives. As I said yesterday, this shouldn’t be a hard sell.

Oddly, the hard sell is mostly going on in the blogosphere (see ONE Campaign, for example) and being covered by overseas media.

The American media isn’t paying much attention … sigh.

The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization was launched a decade ago out of Seattle, by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and initially operated by PATH. It remains the single-biggest project the Seattle philanthropy has ever done, and yet has been fairly low-profile.

I wrote about the launch of this project almost exactly a decade ago, when it was just getting started (and when newspapers had money for travel and foreign correspondences).

GAVI has since prevented an estimated 5 million deaths — more than the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, or any global health initiative out there right now. This is pretty much a big fat success story.

Still, hardly anybody knew (or knows) the story. The lack of public recognition didn’t matter so much before, but has turned into a funding problem. So there’s this big media blitz going on in advance of the Monday summit, where governments and donors will be asked to declare what level of support they intend to provide to GAVI.

Here are some further news reports/comments leading up to Monday:

BBC: It’s “make or break” for global vaccines initiative

The Independent: Four-hour meeting on vaccines could save 4 million lives

Orin Levine, Huffington Post: 10 years of vaccine progress in 10 days

Amanda Glassman at the Center for Global Development: Will Obama provide adequate money for vaccines?

FILED UNDER: Health, Gates Foundation, GAVI, Obama Administration, vaccines
May 10, 2011 | 11:06 AM | By

GlobalPost looks at Obama Admin’s “stumbling” Global Health Initiative

“A slow, stumbling start.”

That’s how John Donnelly, writing in GlobalPost, characterizes the Obama Administration’s Global Health Initiative. The online international news organization has published a short series called  “Healing the World” (yeah, kind of corny) that critically examines the initiative.

The U.S. government is, in fact, doing a lot when it comes to global health needs on a number of fronts — most of which were launched under President George Bush.

The Bush Administration’s global health “strategery” led to PEPFAR, a massive effort aimed at helping those with HIV/AIDS in Africa, the President’s Malaria Initiative and we remain the largest donor to multilateral initiatives like the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria.

These are amazingly grand and good things we are doing. But part of the problem with the U.S. approach to global health has been a lack of coordination among these initiatives and the various agencies carrying them out. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, Global Fund, Global Health Initiative, GlobalPost, Hillary, Lois Quam, Obama Administration, Pepfar, Stephen Morrison
May 3, 2011 | 9:50 AM | By

With Bin Laden’s death, foreign aid to Pakistan under the microscope

Flickr, k-ideas

Now that Osama Bin Laden is dead, many are taking a hard look at the massive U.S. program of foreign aid to Pakistan – about $3 billion a year, half of that to pay them for helping us fight terrorism.

I hope they’ll take a hard look not just at what we’re getting for the money but why we give it.

What exactly are we trying do with what we call foreign aid?

We actually give very little, per capita and compared to most wealthy nations. And we seem to be giving it mostly for political reasons.

When Egypt erupted in popular protest against dictatorship, many Americans (including, apparently some members of Congress!) were surprised to learn that Egypt was the second or third largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid — and that most of that “aid” went to buy military supplies. Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Politics, foreign aid, foreign policy, global health, Obama Administration, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan