Reaffirming American Leadership on Global Health
| Date | Friday, November 5, 2010 |
| Time | 1:30 pm - 3:00 pm |
| Location | The Stimson Center |
Featuring
Mark Green
Managing Director, Malaria No More Policy Center
Former Member of Congress and US Ambassador to Tanzania
The first decade of the 21st Century has seen a dramatic increase in American leadership regarding development programs in general and global health in particular. In fact, not since President John F. Kennedy's launch of the Peace Corps a half century ago has there been such an increase in American engagement in regions like Africa and Latin America.
However, more recently, a number of factors have conspired to shake the political foundation of such historic programs as the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) and American financial investment in the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (the Global Fund).
It is also vital that in order to reaffirm America's leadership on global health and to exercise "smart power," we must modernize our foreign aid system. In recent years, under both Republican and Democratic Congressional majorities, we've allowed our foreign assistance tools to lose some of their edge. Some of that's due to funding, some to fragmentation of program authorities, and some to insufficient monitoring and evaluation. That more and more of our development operations seem to be carried out by our uniformed men and women is a sign of that "lost edge." While the use of these forces is sometimes necessary - especially in areas where security is uncertain or where the transition away from active fighting is just beginning - all too often it's due to capacity and resource limitations in agencies like USAID. While our servicemen and servicewomen are very simply the best in the world at what they do, assistance-type work isn't, and shouldn't be, a core function of their work in the field.
Mark Green, Managing Director of the Malaria No More Policy Center, and former Member of Congress and US Ambassador to Tanzania, will explore the aforementioned factors, discuss the role these programs play in contemporary American diplomacy and foreign policy, and offer thoughts on how to rebuild bipartisan support for them. He will make the case for a renewed sense of American leadership on global health.
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