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>> Objectives, Outcomes and amounts of foreign aid >> Sources and amounts of private investment and lending >> Sources and amounts of private aid >> Taking the full measure of U.S. International assistance >> Notes >> Background paper >> References
ODA also does not fully include humanitarian and development activities sponsored by the
Department of Defense. International food drops, earthquake relief, and medicine deliveries have
been counted since 1991, and these totaled $2.3 billion through 2000. DAC reporting also allows
the inclusion, when possible, of military costs related to monitoring elections, rebuilding infrastructure, supporting in-country narcotics control, reducing security threats and demobilizing
armies, and postconflict peacebuilding.
But Department of Defense spending on humanitarian and development activities is probably
much higher than currently reported. For example, in 1999 the department spent $6.2
billion on contingency operations related to foreign military crises and peacekeeping, including
in Bosnia and Herzegovina and East Timor. These operations involved humanitarian and
development activities such as building schools, hospitals, and roads. But because the costs of
these activities are not broken out from the $6.2 billion, they are not included in ODA.
If the Department of Defense better identified these budget items, the U.S. government could
include them in its ODA calculations. Included would be more efforts like those of the hundreds of U.S. Marines called into Honduras after Hurricane Mitch to distribute donated goods. Even if humanitarian activities accounted for just 15 percent of the department’s contingency operations
in 1999, their inclusion would have raised U.S. ODA by $1 billion.
DAC donors devote different percentages of their ODA to different development activities. For
example, the United States allocates 20 percent of its ODA to basic social services such as education, health, population, and water and sanitation (figure 6.1). Only the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Luxembourg devote larger percentages of ODA to basic social services. Compared with the
average for all donors, the United States spends more of its ODA on emergency, humanitarian,
and government and civil society programs. Other DAC donors invest larger portions of their
ODA in economic infrastructure, agriculture and industry, and water and sanitation systems. In the
two-year period 1997-98 the United States gave developing countries an average of $570 million
a year for population programs, or two-thirds of the total ODA from all other countries for this
purpose. The United States provided a considerably smaller percentage for health (15 percent of
the total ODA from all other countries for this purpose), education (10 percent), and water and
sanitation (0.03 percent).
Sources and amounts of private investment and lending
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