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Barack Obama campaigning in Chicago in 2008. Could future candidates campaign on a platform of funding foreign aid?
Guest post by NPR’s Matt Thompson.
The big story of the week is the fallout from the news that rich countries aren’t going to meet the Global Fund’s baseline requests for funding over the next three years. So it’s worth thinking about the political realities this reflects, and how activists might change those realities, at least in the U.S.
Conventional wisdom dictates that foreign aid is a political loser. Polls routinely remind us how much Americans want to shrink the (less-than one percent) sliver of the federal budget that goes to foreign aid. But I’ve seen numerous developments over the past few weeks that suggest that one could make a strong political case for increasing our levels of foreign aid: Continue reading