USAID General Publications Driving Progress Beyond Programs

USAID, March, 2023

Since USAID’s founding more than 60 years ago, we have helped tackle many of the challenges of our time. With development partners around the world, we helped lift communities out of poverty, push back against oppression, and secure peace after conflict. We helped spark the Green Revolution and avert an age of global and continuous famine. We helped eradicate smallpox, reverse the spread of AIDS, end Ebola outbreaks, lead the campaign that has nearly eradicated polio, and dramatically decrease the incidence of malaria and tuberculosis. We supported dozens of transitions from autocracy to democracy, enabled tens of millions of girls to attend school, and provided lifesaving aid to communities torn apart by disasters, wars, and other crises.

Yet despite this remarkable progress, the development challenges of today are more formidable than those the world has faced at any time since World War II, with significant implications for America’s national security. The COVID-19 pandemic caused mass devastation, resulting in millions of deaths, economic turmoil, and rising global inequality. The climate crisis bears down on us all, with particularly vicious and destabilizing impacts on those least able to withstand its effects—and least responsible for the emissions that caused it. Vladimir Putin’s brutal war on Ukraine has led to widespread misery and death and exacerbated a global food crisis to levels not seen in decades. In every region of the world, autocrats have become increasingly brazen, while democratic institutions and governance face a multitude of threats. All of these developments have combined to inflict significant economic harm on the world’s most marginalized communities.

These headwinds are occurring at a speed and scale never before witnessed, bypassing borders and affecting nations regardless of ideology or system of government. They are deeply interconnected, with climate change accelerating global hunger, the pandemic exacerbating long-standing economic challenges, and pervasive inequality contributing to democratic decline.