New York Times: In Switch, Development Agency Welcomes Business and Technology to Poverty Fight
USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, “who will face tough questions about his $20 billion budget in testimony to Congress on Tuesday, has set off a fierce debate over the way the agency operates and the usefulness of traditional foreign aid. Rather than pouring billions of public dollars into programs to fight poverty, the agency is increasingly using loan guarantees to get local banks to finance big projects, giving its money directly to foreign development groups and embracing projects like the ‘Cuban Twitter’ account, which deliberately hid American involvement and shut down in failure in 2012…” (Nixon, 4/7).