Our global coping mechanisms are on a brink. The World Food Program is slashing emergency humanitarian programs amidst a reported $5 billion budget gap. The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria faces its own multi-billion dollar gap that will prevent live-saving services from reaching millions of people. The H1N1 virus has officially reached global pandemic proportions, with uncertain implications. Meanwhile climate change proceeds at a quietly relentless pace, straining ecosystems and social systems across the planet.  

How to manage the complexity? In the United States, the Obama Administration has been criticized for setting too many priorities at once. Yet the critique of an overcrowded plate overlooks the fundamental challenge of modern public leadership.  Today there is no choice but to tackle a multidimensional global agenda.  Which among macroeconomic coordination, food production, energy, climate change, or disease control could be considered optional at this stage? 

The reality is that problem-solving must now be both multilateral and multisectoral.  Even in the United States, the world’s richest country by many measures, long term prosperity hinges on concerted progress across health care, education, energy and infrastructure.  Foreign policy success will hinge on programs to address global health, agriculture, and climate change.  It is far from trivial that budget director Peter Orszag has stressed health care performance as the single biggest priority for America’s long term fiscal wellbeing. Nor are the climate-linked agricultural and economic warnings of Energy Secretary Steven Chu to be taken lightly. 

The United States’ need for multi-sector leadership only parallels the challenge already felt throughout the rest of the world, especially in the poorest countries. Consider, for example, the chronic crisis of hunger in sub-Saharan Africa. An understanding of basic agriculture is required to help double stagnant crop yields.  Core concepts of environmental science are needed to manage land and migration pressures amidst climate change. Health systems are essential for promoting farmers’ productivity.  Simple engineering is crucial to irrigation, energy, and transport.  

The world of multisectoral multilateralism requires trained professionals at all levels, across all countries, who are able to connect practical problem-solving across specialized disciplines on a day-to-day basis.  Unfortunately, the world does not yet train people for these tasks. Our higher education systems overwhelmingly reward targeted, single discipline studies while so many of the world’s most pressing issues require solutions that draw systematically from insights across disciplines.  Specialists remain essential but vastly more people should have at least a basic understanding of the spectrum of topics underpinning core global challenges. 

This was the conclusion that colleagues and I recently reached through the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and hosted by the Earth Institute at Columbia University. We identified a stark need for scientifically savvy policy generalists, practitioners who can bridge the work of specialists through knowledge of four pillars of sustainable development: natural sciences, health sciences, social sciences and management. In academic jargon, one could say that the commission outlined the need for “science-based policy MBAs.” 

The Commission recommended a new global form of graduate degree program, a Master’s in Development Practice, to train professionals across the four basic pillars, with an emphasis on practical skills and field training.  It also recommended that students practice working in networks across borders and time zones as a normal habit, empowered by simple webcams and cheap software.

Last October the Foundation committed a pool of more than $15 million to seeding these new degree programs. In the following two months more than 140 universities submitted formal letters of interest from around the world.  On July 1, the Foundation announced its first tranche of support to institutions throughout Australia, Botswana, China, India, Ireland, Nigeria, Senegal, and the United States. Amidst a time of such remarkable global turbulence, it is notable that universities are leading the charge of policy renewal. This might be the first time that a new form of degree program has been launched concurrently in so many corners of the globe.

Today’s unanticipated global maelstrom is forcing governments, businesses and citizens to remember our interconnected fragility and purpose.  Thinking narrowly about priorities will lead to narrow thinking on solutions.  We must recognize the interwoven nature of the global agenda, and move quickly to train the practitioners who will manage the complex course ahead.

John McArthur is the CEO and Executive Director of Millennium Promise. He is based in New York. Follow John on Twitter @johnmca or email him at john.mcarthur@millenniumpromise.org.

The story behind the African Leadership Academy is remarkable.  Fred, who was born in Ghana and grew up throughout Africa, attended US universities for both his undergraduate degree and for business school.  Having worked at McKinsey and in other top-tier business environments, Fred and his three co-founders identified the need for a top-tier pan-African school to train future generations of leaders from across the continent.  They set a goal to bring talented young people together from across Africa for two years of intensive pre-university education in academics, entrepreneurship and leadership.  The central ambition is to foster cohorts of world-class African leaders of all forms, and to expose talented young Africans to global leaders from all fields as part of their day-to-day education.  

Within less than five years, Fred and his colleagues have established a campus in Johannesburg, recruited top-flight faculty, and raised resources to provide full scholarships to the vast majority of students.  For recruitment, they started by sending letters to 1,600 headmasters around Africa and asking each to nominate their top 4 students, based on a holistic sense of talent and who is committed to making their communities better.  Students are chosen based solely on merit and prospects for entrepreneurialism of various forms. Roughly 1,500 students applied for 100 spots in the first year, and more than 2,000 applied in the second year. 

The school’s first class includes William Kamkwamba, a boy from rural Malawi whose family couldn’t afford to send him to school, but who somewhat famously still built an electricity-generating windmill from scratch. Another is Miranda Nyathi, a South African girl who decided that when her school couldn’t find a math teacher, she would teach the class herself. The school follows the principle that such students not only benefit from access to opportunities, but reinforce each others’ talents when they live and study together for an extended period.  

Importantly, the school’s leadership is thinking far into the future, on how to sustain the support and strength of the community for decades to come.  Students will have long-term loan forgiveness incentives to launch their careers in Africa, regardless of where they go to university.  And on the side of important intangibles, they will be part of a global network of support as they face forthcoming life junctures. I am excited to learn more about the African Leadership Academy, and encourage others to do so too.  

Meanwhile, earlier in the day the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation (no relation) announced major grants to launch new Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) programs across the globe.  This is in follow-up to the recommendations of the International Commission on Education for Sustainable Development Practice, which I had the privilege to co-chair with Jeffrey Sachs, and whose report  was released in October 2008. Over 70 universities around the world competed for the nine grants awarded.

As the Foundation’s announcement describes,

MDP programs are designed to provide graduate students with training beyond the typical focus on classroom study of economics and management found in most development studies. The program’s core curriculum combines classroom study in a range of disciplines, including agriculture, policy, health, engineering, management, environmental science, education, and nutrition with field training experiences.

[…] The universities that will receive funding to establish the nine MDP programs are:

Emory University (Atlanta, Ga.) will emphasize the health and governance-related aspects of sustainable development through its work with partners that include the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CARE, and the Carter Center.

The Energy Resources Institute University (New Delhi, India) will emphasize energy and climate sciences, building on its contributions to scientific and policy research in energy, environment, and sustainable development.

James Cook University (Cairns and Townsville, Australia) will offer coursework at its two campuses and field training in the Philippines and Indonesia, focusing on the challenges to sustainable development and governance in tropical island nations in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin (Dublin, Ireland) will integrate their teaching in international development and also partner with the National University of Rwanda to offer field training and coursework in conservation and sustainable development.

Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) will build on its English-language degrees and Master’s programs in international development and public administration to focus on development models for China.

University of Cheikh Anta Diop (Dakar, Senegal) will focus on current development challenges facing Africa by integrating health, social and natural sciences, engineering, information technology, and management. It will also serve as a MDP program hub for French-speaking West African nations.

University of Botswana (Gaborone, Botswana) will create a modular program designed for working professionals. Rigorous independent study will be complemented by two to three weeks of on campus training each semester. University of Botswana will partner with University of Florida to offer field training experiences in Botswana.

University of Florida (Gainesville, Fla.) will implement a program that includes the core curriculum, building on University of Florida’s expertise in conservation and sustainable development, especially in Latin America. The program also incorporates faculty and student exchanges and a field-training program in Botswana, in partnership with University of Botswana.

University of Ibadan (Ibadan, Nigeria) will build on existing graduate programs in health, science, and natural resources with the long-term goal of creating a Centre for Development Studies. It will also serve as a MDP program hub for English-speaking West African nations.

The universities are expected to produce 250 graduates with a Master’s in Development Practice degree by 2012, with a total of 750 students enrolled. They were selected based on five criteria, including support from top university leadership, excellent infrastructure and academic programs, and the ability to serve as regional hub; geographic representation among students and exceptional faculty across the four core competencies of the natural, health, and social sciences and management; and a timeline and business plan for financial sustainability when funding ends in three years. In 2010, MacArthur will fund up to five additional universities to create additional MDP programs.

The African Leadership Academy and the global MDP program are two exciting steps in a growing educational movement that is connecting classrooms in all corners of the world with international networks of common ambition and expertise. The future of socially minded leadership and public problem-solving shines brighter with each such initiative that takes hold.  

John McArthur is the CEO and Executive Director of Millennium Promise. He is based in New York. Follow John on Twitter @johnmca or email him at john.mcarthur@millenniumpromise.org.

Among the headline development indicators, aggregate measures of African income poverty have shown the most modest long-term progress. Researchers Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion have produced the best technical estimates of poverty trends back to 1981. These show that the percentage of people in Sub-Saharan Africa living under $2/day measure of poverty dropped only slightly from 74% in 1981 to 73% in 2005, the most recent year with available data. The same research shows that the percentage of Africans living in “extreme poverty,” measured as less than of $1.25/day, has been similarly constant, dropping from 53% in 1981 to 51% in 2005.

But those longer time trends obscure a more recent upturn in progress. After the economic tumult of the 1980s and early 1990s, African poverty reduction and economic growth started to make a comeback over the past decade. Between 1999 and 2005, the share of Africans living in extreme poverty dropped 7%, from 58% to 51%. This was a faster rate of progress than South Asia’s over the same period. And prior to the current crisis, a large number of African countries were averaging more than 5% annual real GDP growth in recent years. These countries have pushed fiscal balances into surplus, bolstered reserves, and kept inflation rates in the single digits.

Many aggregate social indicators have also seen tremendous progress over the past few decades. For example:

• Africa’s under-5 child mortality rates declined from 229 per 1,000 births in 1970 to 146 in 2007.

• Measles deaths dropped by 90% in just six years, from roughly 396,000 per year in 2000 to 36,000 per year in 2006.

• AIDS treatment has expanded from reaching roughly 10,000 people in 2001 to more than 2 million in 2008.

• Primary school net enrolments jumped from 53% to 70% between 1991 and 2006.

• Adult literacy increased from approximately 27% in 1970 to 62% in 2007.

To be sure, aggregate indicators Africa do not capture the diversity of experiences across 49 countries in the region. While western media outlets tend to persist in relaying stories of political and military conflict around Africa, they have overlooked many countries’ remarkable success, for example:

• After nearly 40% of Malawi’s population required emergency food aid in 2005 as result of crop failure, the country launched a national input subsidy program to support its smallholder farmers. The program reaches 2 million households and has helped boost cereal production from an average of 0.7 tons per hectare (t/ha) in 2005 to 1.5 t/ha in 2006 and 2.0 t/ha in 2007. The average GDP growth rate has correspondingly jumped to more than 8 percent in recent years.

• Rwanda experienced a 64% drop in malaria incidence and 66% decline in deaths from malaria within one year of distributing bed nets and making available modern malaria medicine available. In Ethiopia, the same basic interventions resulted in a 60% reduction in incidence and 51% decline in deaths between 2005 and 2007.

• Mozambique’s annual GDP per capita growth rate has averaged nearly 5% over the 15 years since the end of its devastating civil war, with sustained external support helping the country to double economic output per person over the period.

There are just a few of the many country-level successes around Africa, both in economic progress and in social measures of access to health, education, water. While the challenges remain considerable and the level of poverty in much of the region remains extraordinary, this needs to be understood in light of the tremendous progress that so many communities and countries have shown to be possible.

Many of the success stories share attributes of strong local leadership and supportive international partnership. This is why it is so important to debunk the claims of African regress and to understand how misguided it is when people call for the international community to disengage from supporting Africa. There is much momentum underway, led by countless talented and entrepreneurial Africans across the region. Their efforts need continued support through transparent, outcome-driven policies and programs that will help scale-up success as quickly and broadly as possible. And if recent global events have taught us nothing else, it is the interconnected fates of all communities around the world. It is time to understand this, and to start acting accordingly.

John W McArthur is the CEO of Millennium Promise (www.millenniumpromise.org) and can be followed on Twitter.com as “johnmca”.

Perhaps most prominently, the rich countries as a group are roughly $35 billion behind on the support they promised for Africa by 2010. Canada is certainly not the worst performer in this regard, since it is generally adhering to its commitment to double aid to Africa, notwithstanding a downward recalculation of the baseline reference numbers. Importantly, the government outlook has been non-partisan on this issue: both Conservatives and Liberals have relied on the talking point that Canada should be praised for maintaining its commitments. As Minister Oda said this week, “Canada has certainly done its part and more” in terms of aid flows.

But what does it mean to do one’s part and more? Amidst the most profound global economic crisis in three generations, is it adequate to rely on commitments from the beginning of the decade as the reference point for the global urgencies of 2009 and 2010? The World Bank recently estimated that this year an additional 55 to 90 million people will be trapped in $1 a day extreme poverty due to the recession, and that the number of chronically hungry will surpass a billion people. At a time like this, when the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria is struggling to replenish its budgets and a large number of African countries cannot get funding to help their small farmers access fertilizer, what responsibilities do the most privileged countries like Canada have?

The real story is that Canada’s commitments are very modest compared to the size of the global problems in disease control, food production, infrastructure, and education that need to be solved. In 2008 Canada allocated 0.32 percent of its national income to foreign assistance, compared to the mean rich country effort of 0.47 percent. This is also well below the amount of support required to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in the poorest countries, which my colleagues and I in the UN Millennium Project estimated at 0.54 percent of national income after a rigorous multi-year study. Simply put, Canada is not yet doing its part even for the MDGs.

Today Canada ranks 16th out of 22 rich countries in its support levels, well behind comparable economies such as the United Kingdom (0.42 percent and rising), the Netherlands (0.80 percent) and Sweden (0.98 percent). The only countries to allocate a smaller share of their prosperity than Canada last year were Greece (0.20 percent), Italy (0.20), Japan (0.18), New Zealand (0.30), Portugal (0.27) and the United States (0.18).

Even more striking, the OECD projects that Canada will fall even further down the rankings by 2010, the year when it will be the center of global attention as host to both an Olympic Games and a G8 Summit. According to the official statisticians, Canada is projected to rank 20th out of 22 rich countries in terms of its share of income allocated to foreign assistance in 2010. The detailed table is available at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/47/56/42458719.pdf. In the absence of new commitments through to 2015, it is difficult to see how Canada could convene the global agenda from a position of extraordinary strength next year.

In my own read, this trajectory is out of step with the underlying preferences of the Canadian public, who overwhelmingly want to play a leadership rather than followership role for the world on global systems and support for the most disadvantaged. I suspect that most of my fellow Canadians, when considering the statistics above, would think that Canada still has much more to do.

** As a footnote, the Minister’s speech (available at http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/acdicida.nsf/En/NAT-5208469-GYW) included a significant error in citing an alleged failure to get anti-malaria bednets to poor people. In the past this critique was directed at malaria programs at a time when nets were typically sold rather than distributed, and before free mass distribution programs took hold as official global policy. The reality is that over the past three years foreign aid-financed global programs have helped to distributed more than 150 million nets in Africa alone, halfway to the target of universal coverage across the continent by the end of 2010.

John W McArthur is the CEO of Millennium Promise. He can be emailed at john.mcarthur@millenniumpromise.org and followed on Twitter.com as “johnmca”.

In practical terms, the debate around foreign aid tends to confuse two basic questions. The first is whether aid-financed programs achieve what they are meant to achieve. The second is whether the same aid-financed programs boost economic growth. The latter topic is important for understanding when countries can graduate from the need for aid to finance public programs exclusively from their own resources.

On the first question, the past decade has shown many unambiguous aid-financed successes. Programs for AIDS treatment, for example, have brought life-saving medicines to more than 2 million people in Africa. Likewise aid-financed programs helped to cut measles deaths in Africa by 90 percent in just 6 years, saving more than 1,000 lives per day. They have also helped Malawi double its food production and supported the distribution of more than 140 million long-lasting insecticide treated anti-malaria bednets within just 3 years.

Have all aid-financed programs achieved such success? Of course not. Does the lack of success in some quarters mean we should cut back on other areas of success? Of course not. Cutting back life-saving health programs would not only have horrific consequences for the millions of current beneficiaries, but it would also leave hanging the millions of others who have yet to be reached by programs that are still being scaled up. The key task is to understand why some aid programs have been so successful while others have not, and to scale up those that work. Common elements of success include clear delivery targets, ground-level ownership of success, transparent allocations of responsibility, and adequate finance to get the job done.

The second question of aid’s effect on economic growth is more complicated. Macroeconomists tend to focus on this topic as a short hand measure of aid’s overarching value. Many think that if aid cannot be statistically linked to growth then it must have been a failure. This framing is short-sighted when it overlooks the first priority of discerning direct programmatic results. We know, for example, that emergency humanitarian aid is inversely correlated with growth, since that aid is (by definition) delivered to avert catastrophe rather than to make long-term investments. But at another end of the spectrum, if aid helps eradicate smallpox but doesn’t create any jobs, is that a failure? Likewise should a program that helps save 2 million people from dying of AIDS be considered a success or failure if it does not create new jobs? And when aid to Africa amounts to approximately $35 per African per year, how many successes should one realistically expect in any case?

At core, economists still have difficulty measuring all the mechanisms through which successful aid programs might contribute to growth. For example, economic theory and evidence teach us that better health and education contribute to better economic outcomes. But macroeconomists have so far had trouble confirming all the statistics to map every link in the chain from aid to health and education to country-level growth. That notwithstanding, it is an interesting if preliminary fact that Africa’s economic growth rates have picked up over the past decade at the same time as aid started to rebound from historic lows, with a particular emphasis on health and education.

Another possible explanation why aid is not more closely linked statistically to growth is that aid programs have not yet directed adequate practical emphasis on productive sectors like agriculture, which dominates the rural economies of sub-Saharan Africa. Total worldwide aid to agriculture from all rich countries to all poor countries amounted to roughly $5 billion in 2007, equivalent to approximately $2 per person for all people living on less than $2 per day (or $4 per person if we assume that roughly half of that population is rural). It is possible that subsistence economies’ biggest and most discernible economic growth returns to foreign aid will lie in productivity boosts among smallholder farmers. Malawi, for example, has enjoyed robust economic growth amidst its boost in food production over the past three years.

The bottom line is that any assessment of aid needs to be unpacked and measured against its purpose. It is unquestionable that aid is helping to finance vast human success stories throughout the world, especially in Africa. These are of merit unto themselves, even when the evidence linking to GDP growth is still pending. They should provide lessons for other programs that can provide key complements for economic development, and might indeed have direct growth consequences.

A humane and strategic approach to aid should boost poor countries’ ability to tackle the challenges of today while helping to build the economic autonomy that will allow them to address the challenges of tomorrow. In the meantime, the global community has an obligation to keep supporting and expanding programs that work, especially during a period of fragility and strain.

John W McArthur is CEO of Millennium Promise.  He can be followed on Twitter.com as “johnmca” and emailed at john.mcarthur@millenniumpromise.org.

Two powerful modern forces provide fresh hope that the world can soon bridge minds across this divide. One is the rapid expansion of wireless data networks to the furthest reaches of the planet. Last week I was in remote parts of central Mali and northern Nigeria. Thanks to new local cell towers, my Blackberry could now send and receive messages in both places. It could also connect with a second remarkable force, the explosive growth of social network technologies like Facebook and Twitter.

From a remote village in Nigeria’s Kaduna state, I “tweeted” moment-to-moment updates to friends around the world about a ceremony to expand local services for basic health, agriculture, education and infrastructure to 15,000 people. Most of these friends will not have the privilege to visit northern Nigeria any time soon. But I know that many of them now feel much more connected to what is happening in that community.

And from the same Nigerian village, I felt connected to the broader world too. While I was tweeting, I saw updates on the same screen from Newark’s dynamic young mayor Cory Booker, from my old friend and civic leader Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, and from New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as he traveled through West Africa. It was striking to think how soon it could be village members rather than me who are sharing and tracking updates on Twitter and its online brethren.

From a policy perspective this connection is important because people raised in the advanced economies of Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and Japan tend to have trouble understanding what life is like for farmers who grow scant crops because they cannot afford a bag of fertilizer, for parents whose children die from a mosquito bite because they could not afford $8 for a modern bednet, or for mothers who deliver babies in clinics without running water.

This shortcoming of empathy and understanding, in my own view, is the deepest reason why the rich countries are letting their governments fall $35 billion behind on their very prominent 2005 commitments to support basic services in Africa by 2010. People very much want to be part of solutions, but the problems of tackling extreme poverty are too often framed as being too complicated, too expensive, too far from home, and, in the end, someone else’s business.

Online social networks have the power to change this. They have the capacity to help communities connect in a deep and meaningful way across previously unbridgeable divides – to understand each other’s concerns, to share information on what works and what does not, and even to track resources to ensure they are delivered where intended.

Across a billion people in the rich world, the $35 billion current gap in promises to Africa amounts to only $35 per person. It is hard to fathom that rich country electorates would accept this delinquency if their communities were more meaningfully connected with remote poor communities in Africa. Indeed it is not hard to see the need for a “facebook for development” strategy that leverages emerging network technologies to decentralize development assistance away from governments and brokers increased support objectively, transparently, and directly between communities. Governments are crucial to the overall development equation, but many things need not wait on them.

The expansion of communications technology has been cited often and rightly for its power in supporting economic opportunities for poor people. It should also be recognized for its power to support psychological connections between the world’s richest and poorest, which should in turn amplify the opportunities for those living under a dollar a day. When traveling I am endlessly amazed at how fast airplanes and cars connect diverse spots across the planet. Now I hope that Twitter and its contemporaries can connect minds across the same distances.

John W McArthur is the CEO of Millennium Promise. He can be followed on Twitter.com as “johnmca” and reached by email at john.mcarthur@millenniumpromise.org.