From the CEO

  • September 19, 2016

    Does epidemic control inadvertently reinforce inequality?

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360
    HIV clinic in Mozambique

    An HIV clinic in Maputo in Mozambique. Photo: Talea Miller/PBS NewsHour/CC BY-NC

    Over the last two years, ministries of health in sub-Saharan Africa and other countries with a high burden of HIV/AIDS have implemented strategies that concentrate resources on high prevalence areas and key populations.

    Encouraged by their donor partners, such as PEPFAR, UNAIDS and The Global Fund, these strategies employ a biomedical approach that focuses on suppressing the viral load in the population in line with UNAIDS’ 90-90-90 objectives to reduce new infections and bring the HIV epidemic under control. If successful, this approach holds out the tantalizing prospect of ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030.

    Often referred to in U.S. government circles as “the pivot,” this shift in strategy reflects constrained foreign assistance budgets as well as a number of successes in fighting AIDS over the last decade. We now have more robust surveillance methods that allow us to better target disease hotspots and key populations, countries have improved diagnostic and laboratory capacity that enable more rapid and sophisticated analyses, and new therapies allow people who are HIV positive to treat HIV/AIDS as a chronic condition instead of a death sentence. Call it the triumph of the medical epidemiologists.

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  • September 8, 2016

    A Deeper Look: Making development more relevant and effective

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    How can we make our work more relevant and effective?

    Earlier this summer, FHI 360 held its first summit on integrated development, Greater Than the Sum of its Parts. Ben Ramalingam, a researcher and the Leader of the Digital & Technology Cluster at the Institute of Development Studies, delivered our keynote address. While Ben was in town, we talked about how to maximize the effectiveness of international development and how we need a paradigm shift to generate real change.

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  • July 14, 2016

    Why we shouldn’t be working ourselves out of a job

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    Patrick FineRecently, I heard the head of a nonprofit organization that works in Africa declare that the goal of his organization is to work itself out of a job.

    “With your support now,” he assured the audience, “in just a few years, our help won’t be needed.”

    This is an old adage among development workers and one that is especially popular with some funders, such as the U.S. Congress, who think of foreign assistance as global philanthropy to provide a short-term hand up — not a hand out.

    With this view goes the belief that if we just do a good job, then prosperous, well-governed communities will quickly take root and eliminate the need for further assistance. After all, that’s what happened in South Korea. Unfortunately, success in one country does not predict success in another, and all the evidence on social and economic development tells us we still have a long row to hoe.

    If you date the modern era of international development to the emergence of the post-World War II world order and the end of European colonialism in the late 1950s, then we’ve been trying to work ourselves out of a job for more than 60 years.

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  • June 14, 2016

    A conversation on coming to terms with the high cost of human development

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    How do we measure nonprofit organizational effectiveness?

    I was delighted to have a conversation with Jeri Eckhart Queenan, Partner & Global Development Practice Head at the Bridgespan Group, about the challenges in financing development. This was a great opportunity to discuss emerging trends in how organizations manage their programs in order to deliver the most effective results while maximizing value for their stakeholders, especially the beneficiaries of their work.

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  • May 17, 2016

    Women and girls deserve better

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    How can an adolescent girl succeed in school if she is not protected from sexual violence inside the classroom? How does a child thrive when his mother must choose between buying medication or nutritious food? We know that poverty, lack of access to education, poor health and violence are intimately linked, and how we tackle these problems is a global issue with important implications for the way the United States funds international development programs for women and girls. At the moment, we tend to compartmentalize our efforts in top-down, single-issue solutions, not because that is the most effective way to meet the needs of women and girls, but because it meets the needs of funders and their implementing partners. As we enter the new era of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), we need to do better.

    There is an obvious starting point.

    We need to be a lot more deliberate and get a lot better at integrating efforts to improve the well-being of women and girls. Given the siloed nature of how we organize development work, especially in terms of funding and specialized expertise, we tend to think and act with narrowly predetermined notions of cause and effect. As a result, we miss vital connections and opportunities for action and impact. For example, I recently asked an African Minister of Health what was the biggest obstacle to women’s and girls’ health, and he immediately responded, “access to transport” to get to health facilities and obtain medicines. And yet, how often does transport come up as a priority when funders and development agencies plan health programs?

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  • March 31, 2016

    A conversation on ending extreme poverty

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    What will it take to eradicate extreme poverty?

    I sat down with Carla Koppell, Vice President for the Center for Applied Conflict Transformation at the United States Institute of Peace to discuss the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) ambitious Vision to End Extreme Poverty. A former Chief Strategy Officer at USAID, Koppell shares her insight on how the international development community can turn vision into reality.

    Why focus on extreme poverty? How do strategies for addressing extreme poverty differ in states with weak institutions? How do we balance getting rapid results with strengthening local capacity? These are just a few of the topics we dive into as we search for ways to turn ideas into action.

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  • November 24, 2015

    Achieving USAID’s 30 percent local spending goal

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    In 2010, the United States Agency for International Development formulated a bold, new agenda for modernizing U.S. foreign assistance. Christened USAID Forward, one of its most notable features was an objective to program 30 percent of development assistance directly to local governments and civil society organizations.

    At the time, only about 10 percent of USAID’s funding was awarded to local organizations. Earmarking U.S. assistance for local organizations was cheered by developing country partners and U.S. advocacy groups, such as the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network and the Center for Global Development, who had long argued that international NGOs, however well-intentioned, crowded out local actors and limited the growth of local capacity.

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  • October 20, 2015

    The age of integration

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360
    Tricia Petruney, Technical Advisor, Research Utilization and Integrated Development, FHI 360

    The Sustainable Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in September provide an expansive vision of what we can accomplish over the next 15 years. Unlike the previous global development agenda, they include goals for all countries, not just poor ones, and more consideration for protecting our planet. The language also emphasizes that the new goals are integrated and indivisible, something the authors explain as win-win cooperation among the social, economic and environmental domains.

    Now that the new global agenda is officially launched with slick logos and celebrity endorsements, and as the cheers (and some boos) start to die down, it’s time to talk about the hard stuff: How do we actually operationalize an integrated development agenda?

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  • September 22, 2015

    No longer at ease: Country ownership in an interconnected world

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    Patrick FineOn September 15th, I had the honor of being invited to speak with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Uganda and its development partners about country ownership as part of their Development Speakers series. The text of my remarks and the accompanying slides illustrate the evolution of country ownership in the 21st century from when the concept was first developed in the postcolonial period to incorporation into development doctrine at the turn of the century. If you are interested in how I think it has changed, I encourage you to check out my remarks and presentation.

  • July 13, 2015

    It’s time we broaden the definition of country ownership

    Written by
    Patrick Fine, Chief Executive Officer, FHI 360

    Over the past 15 years, country ownership has become one of the central tenets of the aid effectiveness agenda and a part of every development worker’s vocabulary. Yet, we have never adequately reconciled the concept of ownership with the need for a country to be accountable for its policies, including controlling patronage and corruption.

    This is partly because both donors and their development partners are willing to treat development partnerships and activities as technical interventions insulated from local politics rather than explicitly recognizing that the allocation of scarce resources, including foreign aid, is inherently political.

    The concept of country ownership is too often invoked to protect the status quo... Click To Tweet

    This tendency has resulted in country ownership being defined in a narrow, unidirectional manner that makes confronting the binding policy constraints to economic and social progress much more difficult. In these circumstances, the concept of country ownership is too often invoked to protect the status quo instead of advancing sustainable development.

    Read the remainder of the blog here.