GFI Founder’s Update–January 2021
Dear Friend,
Last week the U.S. inaugurated a new President and a new vision for U.S. leadership. A vision where the U.S. will “lead by the power of its example not merely by the example of its power.” I commend President Biden and Vice-President Harris for making US international relations a top priority and for re-energizing the United States’ bilateral and multilateral partnerships.
Essential to a new US international agenda is to re-define the role and priorities of US foreign assistance. To lead this effort President Biden has nominated former UN Ambassador Samantha Power as Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). Once confirmed, Ambassador Power will oversee the world’s largest international development agency — USAID.
Most importantly, Ambassador Power will lead USAID at a time of unprecedented global health and economic trauma. Her first objective is to direct USAID’s response to the twin pandemics: COVID-19 and global economic recovery. To ensure both daunting challenges are addressed, USAID’s strategy must achieve two important and equal outcomes — health care and jobs — particularly for those working in the informal economy. As many know, work — especially decent work — has not been a high priority for USAID. Today, I ask the new Administrator to make the future of work a central part of USAID’s international development agenda.
Investing in work and in the welfare of workers should be a cornerstone of US development assistance. Job creation and expanding worker protections should be the leading indicators used to assess the impact and success of US Government grant-making. Utilizing these key leading indicators is particularly important because informal workers are the poorest and least protected workers in every country. The importance of these indicators cannot be overstated particularly for development and investment programs that work directly with informal sectors including agriculture and SME programs as well as micro and small lending initiatives. If USAID wants to have the best chance to improve the lives of the poor, it must design its programs — especially those impacting informal workers — so that all conditions of work are mainstreamed and are integral to assessing impact.
In every country, the poor have had to carry a disproportionate share of illness and death because of COVID-19 simply because they lack the most basic health care. The global pandemic has also revealed the heavy and unequal burden front-line and informal workers have had to shoulder in every country including the US: because they had to work, they had to put themselves at risk. The world cannot deny the inequality and unfair burden it now sees each and every day. We must do better. USAID has an opportunity to demonstrate how to redistribute these burdens of illness, death and job risk so that the health and economic crisis no longer falls unfairly on the shoulders of the poor. The most effective way to redistribute these burdens and help lift the poor out of poverty is to mainstream both the conditions of work and informality.
A decade ago, USAID mainstreamed gender into its work. It understood then that unless every program and every professional understood that gender had to be incorporated at every turn, the burden of poverty would continue to disproportionately fall on women. The decision to mainstream gender was a comprehensive, multi-stakeholder effort that created a new pillar to assess impact. USAID’s decision to mainstream gender and women’s empowerment had a ripple effect changing the way grantees, contractors, peer agencies and US aid beneficiaries understood and assessed their work and its impact on women. It was then and is now a model of leadership. It is time to mainstream informality. USAID must replicate its gender mainstreaming model to catalyze the mainstreaming of informality and future of workers for all of its international development programming. Doing so will have a global impact.
I commend Ambassador Power for stepping forward to guide the foreign assistance and “soft” diplomacy work of the United States through such a challenging moment in our history and we at GFI look forward to working with her and the US development community to make the future of workers a central part the Biden-Harris Administration’s policy priorities.
Sincerely,
Karen Tramontano
GFI Founder & President
