Devex Pro Insider: Is aid losing the comms war? And what do we do about it?

Foreign aid has a messaging problem. While its proponents tout it as a smart investment and moral imperative, that message hasn’t always gotten through to American voters. The result? Foreign aid has long been a convenient punching bag for U.S. politicians. And perhaps no one has punched harder than U.S. President Donald Trump, whose “America First” agenda dealt a body blow to USAID. Did USAID’s supporters wait too long to articulate the agency’s value? Was it even possible to break through, given that voters tend to be more preoccupied with domestic bread-and-butter issues than, say, promoting women’s empowerment in Mongolia? The sector is now wrestling with these questions — while redoubling its efforts to show that foreign assistance is indeed compatible with “America First.” By now, you’ve probably heard the various sales pitches: Aid creates new markets for American businesses. It decreases the risk of costly wars. It prevents crises such as pandemics from crossing borders. It counters rivals like China. Will those arguments — no matter how valid — be enough to sway Americans, who vastly overestimate how much the U.S. spends on foreign aid, and often associate it with waste, fraud, and abuse? That remains to be seen — but organizations such as the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition are trying. Last week, USGLC held a two-day Impact Forum in Washington, D.C., to show how aid can advance American interests. The forum hosted high-level speakers to share their messages, and also brought more than 400 state leaders to Capitol Hill to tell elected representatives how much aid mattered to them. Alongside it was the new report “Economic Security Is National Security,” which argues that development and diplomacy can be used offensively, alongside defense, to shape the global economic order. “This is how America wins: by showing up, leading with strength, and getting our full team on the playing field,” USGLC President and CEO Liz Schrayer writes in the report. “Congress faces a clear choice – and proposed cuts to the State Department and international assistance resources would hand our rivals a field day.” Also in today’s edition: Blunt advice … and more blunt advice. Bits and pieces Moral message. At the USGLC forum last week, one journalist cut to the chase. “I think a lot of the advice you’ll get this week will be something like frame your moral and strategic arguments in terms of national interest,” said Josh Rogin of The Washington Post. “In other words, to pretend that it’s really not about helping people, but that it’s about helping the administration or its parochial interest, or its commercial interests or its transactional interests. “I'm not saying don’t do that. I think that can have a benefit. I’ve seen it work. But don’t abandon that moral and strategic argument at the same time. … Don’t buy into the frame that this is just about us or just about money or just about making Trump look good. Because it’s a moral and strategic imperative that will last long beyond the Trump administration.” Sure, we need to argue that aid makes political sense. But we can’t forget it makes moral sense, too. Mo problems. Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese-born British billionaire businessman whose foundation encourages better governance in Africa, didn’t hold back during the 2025 Ibrahim Governance Weekend, held in Marrakech, Morocco, earlier this month. Instead of talking about aid cuts or private investment, he hammered home the point that peace and security need to come first. “Our people will be talking about financing Africa, which is important. … But I’m telling you, what’s the point of financing if you’re going to destroy it and kill each other,” he said during his pointed opening remarks. “Without peace and security, we cannot really move forward.” “I’ll be very frank, Africa today really is not in a nice place. We have more armed conflicts than any time in our history,” he added, citing his home country of Sudan, where “we have a crazy, stupid war between power-hungry generals. … And this is more than what [is] happening in Gaza and Ukraine put together. It is a major disaster.” “We really need to look at ourselves first … please look in the mirror,” he continued. “What you see, guys, is not nice. So please, we need to get our act together, and we need to move forward. I'm sorry it is not a nice statement, but it is the truth.” In Concord? The Concordia Europe Summit was held last week in London, where policy and industry leaders gathered at Church House in the heart of the capital to hear what’s happening in the world, specifically the tectonic shifts in transatlantic relations. It suggests that the first comms job is to get the global south on the agenda. Here, the attention was on geopolitical issues, such as artificial intelligence, energy, security, and the uncertainty caused by Trump. While the global south did not feature heavily, there was a recognition at the conference of the issues mentioned above: that you have to tackle security problems at the source, not when they are on your doorstep. Speakers were critical of the U.K.’s argument that it was necessary to cut spending on aid to fuel defense. Both defense and development, they said, were important security tools. Delegates also spoke about how the world order has broken down. If the United States cannot be relied upon to support the rules-based system it had a lead role in developing, then how can the warring leaders in Sudan be expected to follow it? Wait of the century. The good news? The global gender gap continues to narrow, according to the World Economic Forum’s newly released Global Gender Gap Report 2025. The report, which is in its 19th edition, covers 148 economies, and benchmarks women’s attainment against that of men using a basket of measures based on four indices — political empowerment, economic participation, educational attainment, and health and survival. It found that on the latter measures — education and health — women are at more than 95% parity, but rankings for economic participation and political empowerment remain much lower. Globally, women have achieved 68.8% parity, marking the strongest annual advance since the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet full gender parity remains 123 years away at current rates. Among regions surveyed, Northern America and Europe rank at the top, while the Middle East and Northern Africa round out the bottom. Moving on Dianne Calvi is stepping down as CEO of Village Enterprise, which works to end extreme poverty in rural Africa through entrepreneurship, innovation, and collective action. To date, Village Enterprise has trained over 342,369 people, started over 106,530 businesses, and lifted over 2 million people out of extreme poverty. Aysha House has joined the Brookings Institution as senior director of government affairs. She previously served as vice president of congressional and public affairs at the Millennium Challenge Corporation and senior program coordinator and adviser at USAID’s Feed the Future initiative. T. Christine Luby became head of editorial for the High-Level Climate Champions, which connects the work of governments with the many voluntary and collaborative climate actions taken by cities, regions, businesses, and investors. “As we race toward a climate-resilient, net-zero world, I'm looking forward to elevating voices from across systems and regions - especially those too often left out of global climate conversations,” Luby wrote on LinkedIn. Up next Bonn Climate Change Conference. With just under five months to go until the 30th U.N. Climate Change Conference, or COP30, in Belém, Brazil, climate negotiators are about to descend on Bonn, Germany, for the more understated — but strategically critical — SB 62 talks. Without the spectacle of pavilions or mascots, delegates will wrestle over what will actually be on the table in Brazil. That includes efforts to finalize an unwieldy list of 490 adaptation indicators, forge clarity on competing visions of climate finance, and clarify how countries will respond to last year’s global stocktake. Brazil — eager to frame COP30 as the “implementation COP” — is looking to streamline priorities. Key battlegrounds include the future of adaptation finance, the still-nascent loss and damage fund, and the fate of the $1.3 trillion finance road map born out of COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. Debates over the Paris Agreement’s financial provisions — particularly whether to emphasize private finance (Article 2.1c) or public commitments (Article 9) — will hint at how politically fraught COP30 may become. My colleague Jesse Chase-Lubitz will be in Bonn covering the latest climate developments. If you’re in town, drop her a line at jesse.chaselubitz@devex.com. The First Joint GPEI-Gavi Board Meeting. On June 19, the boards of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, or GPEI, and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance will convene to discuss their shared priorities: “delivering a polio-free world and building stronger immunization systems to protect all children from vaccine-preventable diseases and strengthen our collective health security." Katy Clark, senior program manager at Gavi, told my colleague Sara Jerving that this will be an important discussion “for these people to come together and talk about the realities of our timelines for polio eradication in the existing context. How possible is this? And if so, how long will it take? Can we meet the milestones that we've already laid out for eradication?" “We have … inherent crises around conflict and natural disasters and everything that happens in a lot of the contexts where polio thrives, and then it's compounded by the issue with reduction in funding,” Clark said. “Just follow this space and see if we can do the same with less, or more with less, and if not, then we are going to have to regroup and manage our expectations around our ultimate objectives.”