The U.S. certainly has a robust philanthropic sector - partially because the U.S. government doesn’t provide certain services as government does in other countries, and private philanthropy has been one of the alternative ways of getting funding to these areas.  (Side note: The Chronicle of Philanthropy discussed this week what impact the next president will have on the non-profit sector - different outcomes depending upon the candidate selected. (”The Next President Will Have Strong Nonprofit Ties”).)

It’s interesting to ponder how private philanthropy has grown up in the U.S. as contrasted with other countries - what it looks like in Canada, why it has existed for hundreds of years in Japan, and the certain requirements it takes to qualify as Islamic.

 As I think about philanthropy and growth of the sector, I just like to ask myself whether there is a model that ’should’ be the standard or whether it would be useful to think more expansively.

Numbers cited from ODA reflect an on-going discussion that developed countries should do more, to give more - with the U.S. giving the most in real terms in 2006 with $23.5 billion, but as a percentage of their GNI, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Norway lead the list.  The Index tributes the growth of public-private partnerships, rise of social entrepreneurship, increasing prominance of religous organizations, and effect of remittance flows to be the current driving forces in today’s global philanthropy. 

Focusing on U.S. economic engagement in developing countries, ODA equalled only 12% of the $192b in total economic engagement in 2006.  Potentially more interesting is that the traditional definition of philanthropy - foundations, corporations, universities, voluntary & religous organizations - only equated to 18% of this total.  Most of the economic engagement was found in U.S. remittances and U.S. private capital flows.

Two striking points emerge from this data:

1) Private flows are important - as many economists have highlighted in discussions over development.  Investing in developing countries is important for sustainable growth.  However, with its $23.5b the U.S. government (and governments around the world) have important roles to play.  Positive emphasis on this type of private investment does not mean that it can accomplish everything - government funding must continue (and must be encouraged to continue).

2) The Index’s correct citing of the rise of social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy (and a myriad of other terms) is what makes this sector so interesting, right now.  Increasingly, new and innovative ways are being used to to reach beneficiaries in developing countries.  There is power behind private money - and yet, the rigors of accountability are still not firmly in place.  When you consider the very large spectrum of methods for giving, donating, and intervening - coupled with the infinite number of interest areas, it should be alarming that there are no clearly defined rules on what private money must disclose and no clear basis for how to behave.

Carol Adelman (Director, Center for Global Properity) talks about the significance of the 2008 Index in the Financial Times  -the need for this type of data and the challenge to improve the trends we are seeing.  From my vantage point, while we can’t yet claim to have the answers to solving all economic and development problems - more data in the area of global philanthropy is certainly welcome. 

And to restore any faith you’ve recently lost, the Index provides over seventy pages of the progress being made by dedicated people and organizations to solve the many areas of inequity in our world.

Applebaum doesn’t specifically mention it, but her argument is clearly coming from a Responsibility to Protect (R2P) point of view. For those who are new to the term, R2P is a newish, burgeoning international norm that asserts that governments have a responsibility to protect (hence the phrase) their own citizens. When they can’t or won’t, it is the international community’s responsibility to do so. It has wide support, a lot of enemies, and the Security Council has cited it (among a host of other reasons) to support military interventions. Personally I think it is a pretty good idea.

R2P emerged in a 2001 report (follow the link above) that lays out in pretty vague terms the justifiable reasons for an R2P-intervention:

“Military intervention for human protection purposes is an exceptional and extraord-
inary measure. To be warranted, there must be serious and irreparable harm occurring
to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, of the following kind:

A. large scale loss of life, actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which
is the product either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or
a failed state situation.

B. large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or apprehended, whether carried out by killing,
forced expulsion, acts of terror or rape.” (emphasis added)

I admit that you can make a fair case that the current situation in Burma qualifies under letter A. It involves a large scale loss of life and  state neglect.

But R2P doesn’t just gives a threshold for the type of humanitarian catastrophe that we need before an intervention can be launched. It also offers a set of utterly reasonable “precautionary principles”. These are so logical that even if Applebaum isn’t thinking of R2P, they should/would be part of any military planning nonetheless. They suggest that any military action should have “reasonable prospects” of success. You should have a pretty good idea that you’ll be doing more good than harm when you send in the guns. Military actions should also be the “last resort”. We don’t have either of those here.

Just to be clear. Your military intervention can do two things: kill people and blow things up. You don’t protect someone, you threaten to kill their attacker. The R2P argument is strongest when there is a group of people who are being attacked, because then you can use your military to kill the bad guys - like in the Magnificent Seven. It still makes sense when you have two or more groups fighting each other and a bunch of civilians stuck in the middle - like uh, real life. In either of those cases people are facing flying bullets anyway.

But in this case what would the military do? Use fighter wings to defend air drops of food? That seems harmless enough, but what happens when that food hits the ground and is taken into the junta’s system? Who defends the humanitarian workers then? Troops and artillery I guess, but now we’re fighting a ground war with the junta, and we’ve created a conflict where there wasn’t one before. That isn’t what the people of Burma need right now.

I’m absolutely not saying that the junta is good. They’re not. They are very bad leaders who deserve to be removed. But the norm of humanitarian intervention is best reserved for civil conflicts or other cases of violence and kept out of natural disaster response.

The idea is that female condoms allow women to protect themselves and their partners from STIs without having to convince a many to wear a condom. It makes sense for cultures where conversations about sex are highly taboo, I guess. I still have to wonder if men in these relationships (whether transactional or romantic) don’t still have enough power to demand no condom use at all.

This is getting into a very technical area, and I’m not going to pretend to be an expert. But I think it is a legitimate question if the female condom is just a bad product that people won’t use, or if it needs to be marketed better. Few people like female condoms, but it isn’t as if regular condoms are universally popular - so customer satisfaction is clearly not the only important factor. If the female condom wasn’t so weird and alien, maybe it would be used more. But what percentage of our foreign aid needs to be spent on priming the female condom supply, versus ensuring a sufficient supply of the product that people already know?

At times like this it is helpful to remember the mantra: “The people of Burma do not deserve to die because they have a bad government.”

I suppose the idea is that if you don’t take care of your HIV problem your economy will fall apart anyway, so by that logic it is a good investment.

Of course, it depends a lot on how you measure philanthropy. A lot of Indian billionaires might be giving generously but unanimously, or giving to poor family members even. But it does indicate that India’s wealthy are not sharing their wealth. I wonder how much this is an Indian thing, though. The op/ed gives prominent examples of US philanthropists, but that isn’t statistically meaningful. There must be more US billionaires than Indian billionaires. A few examples of the generous doesn’t demonstrate a Western priority on giving.

But the author does give a great qute from US philanthropist Christopher Hohn, “‘A man who dies rich, dies disgraced”.

• Climate change
• Agriculture
• Growth
• Health
• Governance in challenging environment and
• Longer term development opportunities

Towards the end the article gets a little bit weird, as the author takes issue with EWB’s characterization of poverty and disease as a cause of “sin”. It seems like an interesting theological question, but doesn’t have a lot to do with the issue. On the whole its worth a read.