Humanitarian Groups Struggle With Challenges of Providing Aid

International aid groups have helped persuade the U.S. government that fighting global poverty should be considered a top foreign-policy goal, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told nonprofit organizations gathered here.

This year the State Department made “reducing widespread poverty” one of the priorities of its overarching strategy, known as transformational diplomacy, due in part to the advocacy of nonprofit leaders, Ms. Rice said, at a meeting organized by InterAction, a Washington coalition of about 160 charities that work overseas.

“I know that many of you wanted our definition of transformational diplomacy to more explicitly be a reflection of our commitment to poverty reduction. That was a good suggestion; we accept it,” she said.

Helping poor people overseas is now part of the policy’s top goals, which include promoting democracy, economic growth, and national security.

While the strategy at first did not directly mention antipoverty work, Ms. Rice said providing foreign assistance, such as government grants to charities that work abroad, supporting developing nations’ health and social-welfare programs, and building roads and other national infrastructure, has been a key objective of the Bush administration for the past six years.

Such aid is crucial to preventing the spread of terrorism and a moral obligation of a wealthy nation, Ms. Rice said.

“In the 21st century, defined as it is thus far by an unprecedented and increasing interdependence, human development is both a moral end in itself and also a central pillar of our national security,” she said. “For as long as civil conflicts can beget global crises, as long as preventable diseases destroy the social fabric of entire countries and entire continents, as long as half the human race lives on less than $2 a day, the developing world will neither be just nor will it be stable.”

As a result, President Bush has increased funds for aid programs, most prominently efforts to fight AIDS and malaria, she said.

In addition, she said, he has sought to improve the effectiveness of such work by developing better ways to measure its results and track how much is given by the State Department and other federal agencies, which often do not coordinate their assistance.

Charities have questioned the overhaul of government grant-making and other foreign assistance, saying it may result in distributing U.S. aid to countries for political purposes, as opposed to giving it to nations that have the greatest need.

Ms. Rice sought to play down such worries.

“I know that some fear that the effectiveness reform could be a shift of money away from long-term poverty reduction to more short-term, short-sighted policy goals,” she said. “I understand that concern, but I want to be absolutely clear: We realize the critical role that poverty reduction must play in prioritizing our foreign assistance.”

Ms. Rice’s promises, however, have not ameliorated all the concerns.

Rep. Nita M. Lowey, a Democrat from New York who oversees the Congressional panel that allocates money for foreign aid, criticized the White House when she spoke to InterAction’s members.

While the lawmaker applauded Mr. Bush’s promise to streamline aid, she said the moves have taken the power to decide how to provide assistance and make grants to nonprofit groups away from American officials abroad. “I’m troubled by the top-down fashion,” she said.

During a recent trip to South Asia, U.S. foreign-service officers told her they were unclear how the White House changes will affect aid disbursed in the nations they work in. “I had meetings with ambassadors who haven’t even been consulted with what was happening in their countries,” she said.

To create lasting social change, the philanthropist George Soros told the InterAction meeting, international aid groups need to help improve the governments of developing nations.

But such work is risky, said the founder of the Open Society Institute, a network of grant-making organizations around the world that is based in New York. He said his group’s advocacy efforts have riled dictators and authoritarian leaders in places like Central Asia and have even led the Russian president to denounce the philanthropy.

“President Putin has been telling the rulers of the Central Asian republics basically that my foundations were responsible for the revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine, and for their own protection they should shut down the foundations,” he said.

However, his organization’s education programs, disaster relief, and antipoverty projects provide “political cover” from such threats, Mr. Soros said. The charitable services, which account for the bulk of his group’s donations, “give us a kind of protection,” he said.

Advocacy work doesn’t apply only to foreign governments. Mr. Soros encouraged aid groups to push the White House to pursue diplomacy instead of military action in hot spots around the world.

Mr. Soros acknowledged, however, that his advice may be hard to take for organizations that rely on grants from American agencies. “You are probably reluctant to bite that hand that feeds you,” said Mr. Soros. But “from my personal experience, I think you actually get more results if you do a little bit of biting.”

Perhaps in that vein, Mr. Soros offered a personal suggestion to the audience on what they could do as individuals to improve America. Prompted by a question, the billionaire financier said he is backing Sen. Barack Obama, a Democrat from Illinois, for president in the 2008 election.

While InterAction is not endorsing Mr. Obama — or any other candidate — it is hoping to get an idea on the radar screens of presidential hopefuls.

At the conference, the association said it wants Mr. Bush or his successor to create a new White House position that would oversee American relief and antipoverty efforts around the world, essentially a Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs who would join the president’s cabinet.

Such a position is not unprecedented; Britain and Germany have such officials in the upper echelon of their executive branches, said Samuel A. Worthington, chief executive officer of InterAction.

If the United States wants to establish a “partnership with people who want to pull themselves out of poverty,” he said, “that partnership can only be possible if we recognize as a country that it is in the interest of the American people to have a cabinet-level position of humanitarian development.”

While it’s unclear if President Bush will back the proposal, he did make a similar move last year when he created the role of Director of United States Foreign Assistance. However, the director reports to Ms. Rice, the secretary of state, and is not a member of the White House cabinet.

The role of the U.S. military in humanitarian operations touched off a debate at the conference.

In war-torn countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. soldiers are providing food, building schools, and offering other assistance as a means to build those fractured societies and wipe out a violent insurgency. Such efforts may have put aid workers in danger because they are increasingly being confused with military personnel, say some international organizations.

During the conference, Jim Kolbe, a former Republican congressman from Arizona, said that the armed forces should not be involved in development work in poor nations, but should conduct nonprofit-like operations in war zones and areas hit by natural disasters.

In Afghanistan, “the military is the only one that can provide the security in order to get the rudiments of a civil society,” said Mr. Kolbe, who now works at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, in Washington.

And he said that only the military has the logistics to get food and other supplies to remote parts of the world struck by disaster, such as the desolate mountains of Pakistan that were hit by the 2005 Kashmir earthquake.

But Farshad Rastegar, president of Relief International, in Los Angeles, challenged Mr. Kolbe, saying that military involvement in humanitarian operations increases the danger for himself and his peers.

During a recent trip to Afghanistan, Mr. Rastegar said he drove from Kabul to Jalalabad behind an international military convoy, which aimed a gun at his vehicle during the entire four-hour drive.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life, and I’ve worked in many, many hellholes,” he said.

The incident reflects how difficult it is for soldiers to switch from being warriors to humanitarians, he argued.

There is primarily “one role for the military: They beat people up,” Mr. Rastegar said. “For the same person to go around vaccinating [children], it confuses the roles.”