Reforming Humanitarian Aid and Development Assistance

In no place is US aid more important than where the United States has previously created and exacerbated suffering. The United States’ history of military intervention, regime change, and support for authoritarian governments to protect its own commercial interests has harmed innocent people across the globe. To mitigate these harms, US development assistance should seek to improve people’s lives so that they can decide their own futures. Adopting this approach will require the United States to reflect on the ways that development has failed the communities it intends to serve and incorporate local populations into decision-making processes.

The United States should:

• Invest in developing local communities and economies around the world. Investments should only be subject to limited conditions, like certain human rights and anti-corruption standards. Aid should not be restricted to serve domestic political interests, including restricting access to abortion.

• Enact reparations policies to address past and continuing harms, both at home and abroad. Domestically, the United States must repair the harms done to Black people through colonialism, slavery, food and housing redlining, mass incarceration, and surveillance. Internationally, reparations are due to formerly colonized nations that underwent stunted processes of decolonization by the United States. Reparations and debt forgiveness should be offered without conditions to communities to which they are owed.

• Promote multinational development mechanisms that acknowledge and support existing anti-corruption practices, in addition to incorporating grievance systems into their operating practices.