Can the U.S. adopt the DFID model?

Flikr photo by daveypea used under a Creative Commons license. When it comes to foreign assistance, there is some enthusiasm amongst practitioners that the UK may have developed a superior model to alleviate poverty and promote development.  The UK’s Department for International Development, or DFID, was formed in 1997 with the annunciated objective to fight against world poverty.  The clarity of purpose is not the only reason some critics of the U.S. system praise the British model; it is headed by a Cabinet minister with control over a budget and is aligned with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.  The U.S. system is certainly in need of reform, but is it useful, or even possible, to adopt a DFID-like approach? Anne C. Richard and George Rupp take up this question in their paper, The “DFID Model”: Lessons for the U.S.  While they outline a list of reforms for the U.S. based on the most successful aspects of the DFID model, the authors point out that because the U.S. has a different political landscape from the UK, “wholesale adoption of the DFID model by the U.S. government is not possible.”