In 2010, Africa’s leaders gathered at the African Union in Addis Ababa to celebrate 50 years of independence. In Washington, President Barack Obama marked the occasion by hosting a town hall meeting of young African leaders from nearly 50 countries.

What looked at the time to be a curious way to mark a significant moment in the continent’s history was in fact the genesis of what could become the most innovative Obama initiative in Africa. 

When asked during the session by a young woman from Mali why he had convened such a meeting, Obama said that he wanted “to communicate directly to people who may not assume that the old ways of doing business in Africa are the ways that Africa has to do business.” The president added that he wanted the young leaders to meet each other, to develop a network of like-minded people working for a better future, and to reinforce each other’s goals and aspirations.

That town hall marked the launch of the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI). Over the next two years, YALI engaged Africa’s youth, principally through events coordinated by U.S. embassies throughout the region. Then, during a speech in 2013 in South Africa, Obama announced the establishment of the Washington Fellowship. Subsequently renamed the Mandela Washington Fellowship (MWF), the program initially was designed to bring 500 young leaders to the U.S. for six weeks of executive leadership training at U.S. universities and four days in Washington to meet with each other, leaders in the administration, and to have a town hall with the president. In 2016, the program was increased to 1,000 fellows.

When USAID put the application online for the first class of fellows in December 2013, the response was extraordinary. Nearly 50,000 applied for 500 slots. Similar numbers have applied for the two subsequent classes. Over the course of three classes of fellows, there have been 119,000 applications for 2,000 openings.

The U.S. government kept the qualifications relatively simple. Young men and women from each of sub-Saharan Africa’s 49 countries are eligible to participate, including from countries on which the U.S. has sanctions, such as Sudan, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe. Applicants generally have to be between 25 and 35, proficient in English, possess a proven record of leadership, and have a commitment to return to the continent. Fellows apply for one of three tracks: business and entrepreneurship, civic leadership, or public management.

A review of the program found that in the first cohort, the gender split was 50/50, nearly 40 percent owned a business, and a similar number ran a nonprofit organization. Eighty percent of the class had never traveled to the U.S., and more than half grew up outside capital cities.

The key element of the fellows’ program occurs during the specialized six weeks of leadership training that takes place at nearly 40 universities across the U.S. At the universities, the fellows, in cohorts of 20, are exposed not only to programs tailored specifically for their interests, but to other young Africans who share a passion for making a difference in their communities and countries. For most fellows, meeting other young Africans from different countries is one of YALI’s key benefits, as is forging genuine ties with Americans and U.S. institutions.

The narratives of the 2,000 Mandela Washington Fellows illustrate some of the most compelling stories and realities on the African continent today.

Importantly, the MWF program is cost-efficient, as the average cost of a fellow coming to the U.S. is $24,000. At least half is paid by the participating U.S. universities and a host of companies, including Coca-Cola, IBM, the MasterCard Foundation, AECOM, Microsoft, Intel, McKinsey & Company, GE, and Procter & Gamble, who have made grants or in-kind contributions to the fellowships and the YALI program.

YALI is having an impact on its participants. An initial assessment by IREX, USAID’s implementing partner, found that over 80 percent of male and female fellows who owned businesses reported an increase in earnings in the year following their fellowship in the U.S. Business fellows also leveraged more than $3 million in new sources of support through loans, grants, equity financing, and in-kind contributions.

Fellows who participated in the civic leadership training reported that the impact of their nonprofit organizations nearly tripled to over 1.6 million beneficiaries, with an average contact per fellow increasing from less than 3,000 to just fewer than 15,000 beneficiaries.

Over 80 percent of the fellows reported that they remained in contact with other fellows during the course of the year, and 70 percent indicated they continued to be involved with their host university. The ongoing connectivity is helped by the three regional conferences in Africa that USAID convenes for program alumni, more than 200 internships on the continent—most sponsored by corporate partners—as well as funding for fellows to attend conferences and other programs after they have returned to Africa.

As part of YALI’s broader reach, USAID created four Regional Leadership Centers (RLCs)—in South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, and Senegal—that offer distance and in-class leadership training to about 3,500 participants annually.

The YALI Network (Figure 1) was established in 2013 as a means to stay connected online to the tens of thousands of young Africans who applied for the fellowship but were not selected as well as others interested in the initiative. The network, which provides access to global leaders in relevant fields and opportunities for collaboration on a range of activities, has attracted nearly 250,000 members. Participants in the RLCs and the YALI Network can earn certificates in various courses, including climate change, women’s empowerment, and the election processs.

Figure 1.

Source: YALI Network

YALI, of course is not without its challenges. Recruiting from 49 countries can be exceedingly difficult, and the quality of Skype and telephone connectivity can vary significantly, which impacts the interview process. Due to the high volume of applicants, embassies have learned that they need more time to review applications. Extra efforts have been needed to accommodate fellows with disabilities. YALI’s biggest challenge, though, is winning the support of African leaders who generally have yet to embrace the program due to its unilateral launch.

YALI is a cost-efficient and effective way to invest in Africa’s future, especially as it concerns deepening trade and commerce with the region, strengthening democratic institutions and empowering civil society. If the next administration continues to invest in the program, YALI could become an enduring legacy program of the Obama administration much like the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and the President’s Emergency Program on AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) are, respectively, for the Clinton and Bush administrations. Over time, YALI inevitably would contribute to a new generation of transformative African leadership and deeper ties between the U.S. and Africa in a way that few other programs do.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the issue of inequality. Part of this resurgence can be traced to new evidence of persistent and widening wealth gaps. Average incomes may be converging globally as a result of high growth in emerging markets, stronger growth in many poor countries, and slow growth in rich countries. However, the evidence also shows that within countries a parallel process of income divergence, marginalization and rising inequality is also taking place. Put differently, the rising tide of global prosperity is not lifting all boats.

Much of the international debate on inequality focuses on the distribution of income across and within countries. Other dimensions of inequality have received less attention. This is unfortunate. Amartya Sen has described development as “a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy” by building human capabilities or their capacity to lead the kind of life they value. Income is a means to that end but it is a limited indicator of well-being. Moreover, a person’s income reflects not just personal choice but also their opportunities for improving health, literacy, political participation and other areas. Education is one of the most basic building blocks for the “real freedoms” that Sen describes. People denied the chance to develop their potential through education face diminished prospects and more limited opportunities in areas ranging from health and nutrition, to employment, and participation in political processes. In other words, disparities in education are powerfully connected to wider disparities, including international and intra-country income inequalities. This is why education has been identified as one of the most critical factors in breaking down the disadvantages and social inequalities that are limiting progress toward the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)—development targets adopted by the international community for 2015.

Understanding patterns of educational inequality is critical at many levels. Ethical considerations are of paramount importance. Most people would accept that children’s educational achievements should not be dictated by the wealth of their parents, their gender, their race or their ethnicity. Disparities in educational opportunities are not just inequalities in a technical sense, they are also fundamental in equities—they are unjust and unfair. In an influential paper, John Roemer differentiated between inequalities that reflect factors such as luck, effort and reasonable reward, and those attributable to circumstances that limit opportunity (Roemer 1988).1 While the dividing line may often be blurred, that distinction has an intuitive appeal. Most people have a high level of aversion to the restrictions on what people—especially children—are able to achieve as a result of disparities and inherited disadvantages that limit access to education, nutrition or health care (Wagstaff, 2002). There is a wide body of opinion across political science, philosophy and economics that equal opportunity—as distinct from equality of outcomes—is a benchmark of egalitarian social justice. The theories of distributive justice associated with thinkers such as Amartya Sen, John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin and John Roemer argue, admittedly from very different perspectives, that public policy should aim at equalizing opportunity to counteract disadvantages associated with exogenous circumstances over which individuals or social groups have no control. Given the role of education as a potential leveler of opportunity, it is a national focal point for redistributive social justice.

Considerations of economic efficiency reinforce the ethical case for equalizing educational opportunities. Education is a powerful driver of productivity, economic growth, and innovation. Econometric modeling for both rich and poor countries suggests that an increase in learning achievement (as measured by test score data) of one standard deviation is associated on average with an increase in the long-run growth rate of around 2 percent per capita annually (Hanushek and Wößmann, 2010; Hanushek, 2009; Hanushek and Wößmann, 2008). Such evidence points to the critical role of education and learning in developing a skilled workforce. Countries in which large sections of the population are denied a quality education because of factors linked to potential wealth, gender, ethnicity, language and other markers for disadvantage are not just limiting a fundamental human right. They are also wasting a productive resource and undermining or weakening the human capital of the economy.

International development commitments provide another rationale for equalizing educational opportunities. This is for two reasons. First, the commitments envisage education for all and achievement of universal primary education by 2015. Second, there is mounting evidence that inequality is acting as a brake on progress toward the 2015 goals. Since around 2005, the rate of decline in the out-of-school population has slowed dramatically. Based on current trends, there may be more children out of school in 2015 than there were in 2009. Caution has to be exercised in interpreting short-run trends, especially given the weakness of data. However, the past three editions of the UNESCO Education for All Global Monitoring Report (GMR) have highlighted the role of inequality in contributing to the slowdown with governments struggling to reach populations that face deeply entrenched disadvantages (UNESCO, 2008, 2010, 2011). Therefore, picking up the pace toward the 2015 goals requires a strengthened focus on equity and strategies that target the most marginalized groups and regions of the world (Sumner and Tiwari, 2010; UN-DESA, 2009; UNESCO, 2010). It should be added that disparities in education relate not just to access, but also to learning achievement levels.

Accelerated progress in education would generate wider benefits for the MDGs. Most of the world’s poorest countries are off-track for the 2015 MDG target of halving income poverty and a long way from reaching the targets on child survival, maternal health and nutrition. Changing this picture will require policy interventions at many levels. However, there is overwhelming evidence showing that education—especially of young girls and women—can act as a potent catalyst for change. On one estimate, if all of sub-Saharan Africa’s mothers attained at least some secondary education, there would be 1.8 million fewer child deaths in the region each year. Thus while education may lack the “quick fix” appeal of vaccinations, it can powerfully reinforce health policy interventions.

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Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on Lawfare.

Faced with the breakdown of national armies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, Arab states have increasingly turned toward alliances with armed militias to ensure security. Popular, anti-government protests and insurgencies for the most part precipitated the breakdown of regime military institutions, yet pre-existing internal ethnic, clan, and ideological cleavages helped to hasten the breakdown. The beleaguered state security forces have now entered into a variety of alliances—tacit or active—with militias they deem sympathetic to their interests, often organized on the basis of entrenched ethno-sectarian or tribal identities. Such militia forces supplement and at times even stand in for the weak or absent army and police as providers of local security.

On the one hand, militia forces have in certain circumstances proven effective at counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. On the other hand, they have also committed atrocities against civilians that hamper long-term efforts to build trust and stability. Their greatest risk is that, by eroding the central government’s monopolization on force, they jeopardize the territorial cohesion of the state.

In Iraq, the rise of powerful communal militias has paralleled the growth of the threat from the Islamic State. This has presented the United States with a quandary: how to combat the Islamic State by mobilizing local Sunnis while at the same time safeguarding the broader integrity of the Iraqi state and its security institutions. The national guard concept, which successive Iraqi governments have tried in the past, was seen as one way to do this. A national guard force would retain the militias’ local knowledge and roots, both unique tools necessary for a successful counterinsurgency against the Islamic State. At the same time, the guard would (at least in theory) be subject to increased oversight and control by the central government.

Other fractured Arab states, most notably Libya, have tried to implement a national guard model as a way to harness militia power, but this too has failed. Variations of hybrid, provincially-organized military forces exist in Yemen and Syria. While each case is different, the failure of national guards bears certain similarities. Examining the Iraqi case in particular can highlight the potential utility of national guards but also the parallel political and institutional reforms that are necessary to make the concept work.

The idea of creating a national guard in Iraq has been a centerpiece of U.S. engagement since the dramatic advance of the Islamic State on Tikrit and Mosul in 2014. President Obama specifically mentioned U.S. support for a national guard as a means to help Iraqi Sunnis “secure their own freedom” from the Islamic State. Much of U.S. thinking about the Iraqi National Guard (ING) was guided by the example of the Sunni Awakening of 2006 and 2007, when the United States actively recruited and “flipped” Sunni tribes that had supported the al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency. In return for guarantees of autonomy and military, financial, and political backing, the Sunni tribes were able to turn the tables on the insurgent fighters and impose a measure of peace and stability. The 2014 initiative essentially sought to reproduce this arrangement. The idea was that given proper incentives, the Sunni tribes would again fight the radical Islamists who threatened their supremacy. Over the long term, such national guard forces could be integrated formally as auxiliary troops in a federal structure, comparable in many ways to the U.S. National Guard.

Yet the Awakening analogy failed on a number of levels. The Shi’i-dominated Iraqi central government had never been enthusiastic about empowering Sunni tribes in the first place. With the dismantling of the Iraqi army in 2003, security had effectively devolved to party, tribal, and sectarian militias. Many Iraqis wondered why the United States would seek to create new militias, especially ones recently tied to al-Qaeda and other terrorists. As Iraq scholar Adeed Dawisha described, the gains in security came“not because of the state, but in spite of it.”

As the U.S. began withdrawing from Iraq in 2009 and 2010, then-Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki quickly moved to dismantle the Awakening-associated militias. Only a handful of former militia fighters received their promised positions in the police, army, or civil services. Some former militia leaders were arrested on seemingly politically-motivated charges of terrorism or subversion. Efforts to enact a Sunni-dominated super-region comparable to the federal status of the Kurdish Regional Government in the north were rebuffed, despite the provisions of Iraq’s constitution that allowed for the creation of such an entity. Politically marginalized, some Sunnis returned to their alliance with the radical mujahideen.

The election of the new prime minister Haydar al-Abadi in 2014 raised the promise of renewed Sunni-Shi’i reconciliation. Abadi expressed support for the national guard initiative and forwarded a bill to parliament in 2014. Thousands of volunteers came forward from the Sunni tribes in the west and U.S. and Iraqi officials met with tribal leaders to help solidify support. The United States began to enlist support from Iraq’s Sunni neighbors to provide training and support for the ING.

Yet resistance within Abadi’s own political coalition stymied these efforts. The National Guard bill foundered in parliamentary committee, with open questions about the extent of control vested in provincial governors and the chain of command subordinating the ING to the ministries of interior, defense, or the prime minister himself. Officers of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) regarded the militias as unfit for duty and as rivals for budget and resources. Iraq’s constitution specifically prohibited the formation of militias outside the framework of the armed forces (with an exception of the peshmergaforces of the Kurdish Regional Government). Moreover, there was concern that once the Sunnis were authorized to organize a militia, other ethno-sectarian communities, such as Christians or Turkomen,might try to follow suit out of fear of falling under the mercy of their more powerful neighbors. The ING, then, could undercut any pretense of the Iraqi state possessing a monopoly over the use of force.

At base, though, many of Iraq’s Shi’i leaders simply believed that they didn’t need Sunni support. With the ING initiative stalled in parliament, the Shi’i factions have actively cultivated Shi’i militias as part of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF, or Hashd al-Shaabi). The origins of the PMF can be traced to a statement by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq’s senior Shi’i cleric, which explicitly called on the faithful to take up arms to defend Iraq in the face of the Islamic State onslaught in 2014. Muqtada al-Sadr’s Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Badr Organization, and other political factions quickly took the opportunity to reconstitute or expand their private armies.

Backed by Iran’s expeditionary al-Qods Force, PMF militias played a prominent role in the spring 2015 offensive against the Islamic State in Tikrit. By spring 2015, PMF counted around 60,000 men under arms. Still, the performance of these militias has been less than stellar. In the spring 2015 offensive on Tikrit, PMF forces failed repeatedly to dislodge Islamic State resistance, despite enjoying superiority in numbers. U.S. air support proved critical to allowing the offensive to proceed. Some PMF units quit the fight instead of working under American air cover. Others were involved in a campaign of terror against Sunnis, looting, kidnapping, and killing those suspected of collaborating with the Islamic State.

The prospects for the mobilization of Iraq’s Sunnis are not dead—yet. A handful of Sunni tribes joined the PMF during the Tikrit offensive. In Anbar, likely the next front in the campaign against the Islamic State, U.S. and Iraqi officials have cultivated ties with local Sunni tribes and organized some 8,000 men into Sunni PMF units. Some tribes have made their service conditional on guarantees of greater autonomy and the removal of Shi’i militia forces. Yet the intake for training programs remains slow and drop-out rates high. On the one hand, tribes continue to resent the central government. On the other hand, they fear retribution should the Islamic State return.

Abadi’s visit to Washington in April 2015 focused on expanding and enhancing security cooperation with the United States. The United States has insisted that the PMF be brought more fully under the control of the Iraqi Security Forces and that PMF units reflect the demographics of the provinces and districts in which they operate. This would mean that in ethnically-mixed areas, such as in Nineveh or Babil, each ethnic group would have its own militia proportional to its size in the locality. The Iraq Train and Equip Program (ITEP) is slowly coming online, funneling American money and weapons to various local militia forces as well as ISF.

Cooperating with the United States has been a delicate balancing act for Abadi. While Kurdish and Sunni leaders see U.S. military support as a means to their own ends, Abadi’s own Shi’i political camp—as well as his allies in Tehran—are far more wary. When the U.S. Congress passed a bill in May 2015 effectively mandating the Defense Department to bypass Baghdad and provide support for Sunni and Kurdish fighters directly, Abadi protested that this constituted a grave violation of Iraqi sovereignty.

Still, reliance on the ragtag PMF alone is not sustainable in the long term. Operating far from home and with limited training, these overwhelmingly Shi’i forces cannot be expected to become an army of occupation in Sunni areas like Tikrit or Fallujah. Ultimately, local partners will be necessary to build and maintain peace and stability. The national guard, then, may well re-emerge as a more sustainable structure for administrative and security devolution.

While analysts and policymakers naturally focus on cases of success, there are important lessons to be learned from Iraq’s failures. For countries like Iraq where central armies have more or less broken down and a bevy of militias has emerged in its stead, as in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, the national guard could represent a path to reconstituting fragile state authority.

But for this to happen, several broad principles need to be heeded:

• National guards cannot simply be conceived as short-term, improvised solutions to immediate security crises. Rather, the creation of national guards is part of the impetus of security-sector reform (SSR) and post-conflict demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration (DDR) of armed groups.
• National guards must overcome the legacies of past authoritarian experiences where pro-government militias were often seen as mere thugs for the regime, not a disciplined professional fighting force. In particular, the older officer class of regular forces may see them as competitors. To build trust among the population and other military institutions, national guards should be accompanied by revisions to chain of command establishing clear relationships of authority between the guards, the police, the army, and other security agencies, and subordinating all security services to civilian authorities.
• National guard initiatives must also be accompanied by moves toward political power-sharing arrangements. The success of national guards ultimately depends not just on their short-term tactical effectiveness but on the degree of local buy-in. Constitutions can provide a structure for bolstering confidence between a central government and subnational militia forces. Since militia membership and cohesion is often based on geographic linkages—to town, municipality or province—national guards may well be a part of federalist power devolution, especially in countries with overlapping ethno-sectarian and regional cleavages.
• Western governments can assist in setting up and training national guards, but they must ensure that proper political and institutional reforms are also undertaken. In many cases, Western states provide models for how decentralized, federally-organized military forces can complement national armies and local police. The United States, for instance, has a great deal of experience with its own federalized national guard structure and can draw on this example in its train-and-equip programs. There are other potentially useful models as well, including the British Territorial Army, a part-time, volunteer force that was integrated into the British Army in the early twentieth century; the Danish Home Guard, which incorporated anti-Nazi resistance militias into a national command structure after World War II; or the Italian Carabineri, which is often discussed as a potential model for dealing with Libya’s unique security challenges.

Outside assistance to national guards must avoid exacerbating existing communal and political fault lines. Helping peripheral and minority groups set up their own armed forces can, on one hand, embolden these groups to resist the central government and, on the other hand, spur resentment from the central government and fear of future disloyalty or rebellion. These concerns become even more acute when national guards are seen as proxies for outside powers. With this in mind, the U.S. and outside powers should calibrate their assistance to both regionally-based national guards and central government forces to ensure rough parity between the two. This could entail making funding, equipment and training for the central security services contingent on a proportional commitment to strengthen the guards.

National guards are political institutions, not just military instruments. They can have far-ranging consequences for political stability and cohesion. While no panacea for the challenge of building effective states, they can play an important role in addressing security concerns and moving toward more meaningful power sharing.

The increasing diversification of news media—from online versions of major newspapers to political bloggers, to 24-hour cable news to social media—plus the profession’s changing economics have caused the balance of power between political reporters and presidential candidates to change. Stephen Hess, senior fellow emeritus, says our very good, well-trained reporters are “almost dangerous” to presidential candidates who are trying to stay on message. Thus, says Hess, the way the press covers campaigns has changed as well, and not for the better.

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• Stephen Hess: The Changing Balance of Power in Presidential Campaign Reporting

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While the future impact of rising powers such as Brazil, Russia, India and China is uncertain and the shifting political landscape in the Arab world is still playing out, the influence of these emerging nations is a central fact of geopolitics.

Already the global financial crisis, the Copenhagen climate negotiations, and the debate over Iran sanctions have illustrated the potential, the pitfalls, and above all the centrality of the relationship between American power and the influence of these rising actors and developing democracies.

In a new paper, Senior Fellow Bruce Jones, director of the Managing Global Order Project at Brookings, argues the greatest risk lies not in a single peer competitor but in the erosion of cooperation on issues vital to U.S. interests and a stable world order. U.S. power is indispensible for that purpose but not sufficient. No longer the CEO of Free World Inc., the United States is now the largest minority shareholder in Global Order LLC.

On March 15, the Brookings Institution and Foreign Policy magazine hosted the launch of Bruce Jones’s paper "Largest Minority Shareholder in Global Order LLC: The Changing Balance of Influence and U.S. Strategy." Panelists explored the prospects for cooperation on global finance and transnational threats; the need for new investments in global economic and energy diplomacy; and the case for new crisis management tools to help de-escalate inevitable tensions with emerging powers.

Susan Glasser, editor in chief of Foreign Policy, moderated the discussion. After the presentations, panelists took audience questions.

Video

• Relative Shift in U.S. Balance of Power
• Shifting Coalitions of Consensus
• Paradox of Power for U.S.
• U.S. Needs To Get Serious about Development and Energy

Audio

• Shifting Balance of Power: Has the U.S. Become the Largest Minority Shareholder in the Global Order?

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

• 20110315_global_order

President Obama’s speech at West Point, outlining the way forward on Afghanistan and Pakistan, was followed three days later by two important events underscoring the president’s view that “our security and leadership does not come solely from the strength of our arms.” He conveyed a new smart power view of security that “derives from our people [including] … Peace Corps volunteers who spread hope abroad, and from the men and women in uniform who are part of an unbroken line of sacrifice …”

On December 4, General Anthony Zinni, USMC (Ret.), former commander-in-chief of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), addressed an audience celebrating the tenth anniversary of the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy (ICRD). He pointedly noted that hard power alone cannot fight terrorism; economic and social factors of terrorist populations should be addressed. He further noted that empowering faith-based approaches “is a tremendous asset to inform the ways we mediate and find common ground … to figure out what the other side of smart power means.”

Recognizing that educational reform is critical, ICRD to date has empowered about 2,300 Pakistani madrassas administrators and teachers with enhanced pedagogical skills promoting critical thinking among students, along with conflict resolution through interfaith understanding. Evidence of success is mounting as the program fosters local ownership reasserting Islam’s fundamental teachings of peace and historical contributions to the sciences and institutions of higher learning—a rich history that was misappropriated by extremists who took over a significant number of madrassas using rote learning laced with messages of hate.

Earlier the same day, President Obama’s newly minted Peace Corps Director Aaron Williams, himself a former Dominican Republic Peace Corps volunteer, received high marks from former Senator Harris Wofford—a JFK-era architect of the Peace Corps—and hundreds of NGOs and volunteer leaders at the “International Volunteer Day Symposium.”

Director Williams has embraced a new “global service 2.0” style leadership committed to championing Peace Corps volunteers alongside a growing corps of NGO, faith-based, new social media and corporate service initiatives. Wofford, who co-chairs the Building Bridges Coalition team with former White House Freedom Corps Director John Bridgeland, spoke about the present moment as a time to “crack the atom of citizen people power through service.”

The notion of a “smart power surge” through accelerated deployment of people power through international service, interfaith engagement, and citizen diplomacy should be quickly marshaled at a heightened level to augment the commander-in-chief’s hard power projection strategies outlined at West Point. 

According to successive Terror Free Tomorrow polling, such strategies of service and humanitarian engagement by the United States have been achieving sustainable results in reducing support for terrorism following the tsunami and other disasters from Indonesia to Pakistan and Bangladesh. Lawmakers should take note of these findings, along with the evidence-based success of Johnston’s ICRD Madrassas project (which, inexplicably, has not received federal support to date, in spite of its evidence of marked success in giving Pakistani children and religious figures critical tools that are urgently need to be scaled up across the country to wage peace through enlightened madrassas education and interfaith tolerance).

A growing coalition of now over 400 national organizations is amassing a “Service World” platform for 2010. They have taken a page out of the incredibly successful Service Nation platform, which Barack Obama and John McCain both endorsed, creating a “quantum leap” in domestic service through fast track passage of the Kennedy Serve America Act signed into law by the president last spring. Organizers hope to repeat this quantum leap on the international level through a “Sargent Shriver Serve the World Act,” and through private-sector partnerships and administration initiatives adapting social innovation to empower service corps tackling issues like malaria, clean water, education and peace.  

With the ICRD Pakistan success, a rebounding Peace Corps and the Building Bridges Coalition’s rapid growth of cross-cultural solutions being evaluated by Washington University, the pathway to “the other side of smart power” through service, understanding and acceptance, is being vividly opened.

A Brookings Global Views paper further outlines how multilateral collaboration can be leveraged with other nations in this emerging “global force for good.” It is a good time to reflect on all this as we approach the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps next year in Ann Arbor, where on October 14, 1960 President John F. Kennedy inspired students to mount a new global service.  

President Obama’s call to global engagement in Cairo in June, which ignited the announcement of Service World later that same morning, now demands a response from every citizen who dares to live up to JFK’s exhortation to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” along with our young men and women preparing for engagement at West Point.  

On the heels of the U.N.’s adoption in late September of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030, an Asia Pacific volunteering alliance recently convened a forum for hundreds of youth and development partners from northeast Asia at the Korea Council on Foreign Relations in Seoul.

In his keynote address highlighting the role of volunteers in global development, Young-Mok Kim, president of the Korean International Cooperation Agency (KOICA), stressed the key role of Peace Corps volunteers and the Saemaul Undong village self-help model in Korea’s 50-year rise from a low-income to a high-income nation.

Since 1970, Korea’s Saemaul Undong (“New Community Movement”) has tested a combination of local self-help cooperative action with national development policy addressing poverty, relying on the spirit of rural communities. Local volunteering teams engaging youth and women have been tapped to guide and implement grassroots development projects and counter rural over-migration to urban areas, engaging in housing, local infrastructure and irrigation, credit unions, and cooperative businesses, among other holistic areas while enhancing an overall community spirit of ownership.

“As the first country to escape poverty and achieve economic and social development as well as democratization, the SDGs present us with an opportunity to expand our footprint and visibility in the development arena and live up to international expectations. In Korea, thanks to Saemaul Undong, the poverty rate was reduced from 34.6 percent to 6 percent and rural households’ income reached parity with that of urban households during the period from 1967 to 1984.” The Saemaul Undong model has been adapted in African and other developing nations and was featured in a special high-level forum on rural development during the recent U.N. General Assembly.

Kim stated: “It is important that we facilitate participatory engagement by harnessing the power of volunteerism to meet the key principle of the SDGs” and he indicated that the World Friends Korea (WFK) volunteer program learned from the nation’s experience with the Peace Corps. WFK has sent more than 50,000 volunteers abroad in service projects and to provide technical training. Kim noted KOICA ranks second in the world with regard to the number of volunteers sent to developing countries, sending 4,500 annually to 50 countries.

KOICA was a founding participant in the Asia Pacific Peace and Development Service Alliance (APPDSA) that was launched at the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) headquarters in Bangkok in October 2014 with the support of FK Norway, the Global Peace Foundation, KOICA, the Peace Corps and other partners. Kim hailed the effort “to form an alliance of upgrading our volunteer program and fostering the force of young people who can play crucial roles in the development cooperation arena.”

The multi-stakeholder platform forged in Southeast Asia is now engaging thousands of volunteers in climate-related projects, including massive river clean-up campaigns in Thailand and Nepal and ongoing “green Asia” tree-planting and eco-camps working to address desertification in Mongolia.   

After the Seoul convening, which launched the Northeast Asia volunteering initiative, I travelled to Kathmandu to assess the progress of the South Asia APPDSA Alliance hub for volunteerism. Convened in Nepal just prior to the April earthquake that took more than 9,000 lives, the Alliance’s South Asia convening provided a ready base of volunteers to implement the Kathmandu Call to Action after the disaster struck and served as a springboard for Rise Nepal, a youth-led relief and rebuilding initiative. To date, more than 1,600 young Nepali volunteers have helped nearly 3,000 households with emergency provisions, including food, and medical and hygiene supplies, and have constructed around 600 transitional homes.    

IBM stepped in to provide IT support, equipping youths with software and other technology to facilitate their efforts to rebuild their nation beyond short-term earthquake relief. Since the recent adoption of Nepal’s new constitution, this support is being broadened to include young leadership training in citizenship and service addressing longer-term goals, including SDGs across the South Asia region.

A recent Gallup article noted the power of the more than 1 billion people around the world who engage in volunteer service and the need to marshal their efforts to help countries meet their SDG targets by 2030. Since the Seoul forum, efforts are underway across the Asia-Pacific region to step-up specific volunteerism initiatives, provide technology that will further empower young volunteers, and document the results of ongoing environmental service projects such as the restoration of the Bagmati River in Nepal and counterpart efforts in Bangkok, Mongolia, and the Philippines.  

The growth of such multi-stakeholder volunteering alliances, coupled with KOICA’s experience in forging volunteerism-based community outcomes measurably addressing poverty, hold great promise in marshaling requisite human capital and innovation to help achieve the next generation development goals.

Volunteerism remains a powerful tool for good around the world. Young people, in particular, are motivated by the prospect of creating real and lasting change, as well as gaining valuable learning experiences that come with volunteering. This energy and optimism among youth can be harnessed and mobilized to help meet challenges facing our world today and accomplish such targets as the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

On June 14, young leaders and development agents from leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs), faith-based organizations, corporations, universities, the Peace Corps, and United Nations Volunteers came together at the Brookings Institution to answer the question on how to achieve impacts on the SDGs through international service.

This was also the 10th anniversary gathering of the Building Bridges Coalition—a multi-stakeholder consortium of development volunteers— and included the announcement of a new Service Year Alliance partnership with the coalition to step up international volunteers and village-based volunteering capacity around the world.

Brookings Senior Fellow Homi Kharas, who served as the lead author supporting the high-level panel advising the U.N. secretary-general on the post-2015 development agenda, noted the imperative of engaging community volunteers to scale up effective initiatives, build political awareness, and generate “partnerships with citizens at every level” to achieve the 2030 goals.  

Kharas’ call was echoed in reports on effective grassroots initiatives, including Omnimed’s mobilization of 1,200 village health workers in Uganda’s Mukono district, a dramatic reduction of malaria through Peace Corps efforts with Senegal village volunteers, and Seed Global Health’s partnership to scale up medical doctors and nurses to address critical health professional shortages in the developing world. 

U.N. Youth Envoy Ahmad Alhendawi of Jordan energized young leaders from Atlas Corps, Global Citizen Year, America Solidaria, International Young Leaders Academy, and universities, citing U.N. Security Council Resolution 2250 on youth, peace, and security as “a turning point when it comes to the way we engage with young people globally… to recognize their role for who they are, as peacebuilders, not troublemakers… and equal partners on the ground.”

Service Year Alliance Chair General Stanley McChrystal, former Joint Special Operations commander, acclaimed, “The big idea… of a culture where the expectation [and] habit of service has provided young people an opportunity to do a year of funded, full-time service.” 

Civic Enterprises President John Bridgeland and Brookings Senior Fellow E.J. Dionne, Jr. led a panel with Seed Global Health’s Vanessa Kerry and Atlas Corps’ Scott Beale on policy ideas for the next administration, including offering Global Service Fellowships in United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programs to grow health service corps, student service year loan forgiveness, and technical support through State Department volunteer exchanges. Former Senator Harris Wofford, Building Bridge Coalition’s senior advisor and a founding Peace Corps architect, shared how the coalition’s new “service quantum leap” furthers the original idea announced by President John F. Kennedy, which called for the Peace Corps and the mobilization of one million global volunteers through NGOs, faith-based groups, and universities.

The multi-stakeholder volunteering model was showcased by Richard Dictus, executive coordinator of U.N. Volunteers; Peace Corps Director Carrie Hessler-Radelet; USAID Counselor Susan Reischle; and Diane Melley, IBM vice president for Global Citizenship. Melley highlighted IBM’s 280,000 skills-based employee volunteers who are building community capacity in 130 countries along with Impact 2030—a consortium of 60 companies collaborating with the U.N.—that is “integrating service into overall citizenship activities” while furthering the SDGs.

The faith and millennial leaders who contributed to the coalition’s action plan included Jim Lindsay of Catholic Volunteer Network; Service Year’s Yasmeen Shaheen-McConnell; C. Eduardo Vargas of USAID’s Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives; and moderator David Eisner of Repair the World, a former CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Jesuit Volunteer Corps President Tim Shriver, grandson of the Peace Corps’ founding director, addressed working sessions on engaging faith-based volunteers, which, according to research, account for an estimated 44 percent of nearly one million U.S. global volunteers

The key role of colleges and universities in the coalition’s action plan—including  linking service year with student learning, impact research, and gap year service—was  outlined by Dean Alan Solomont of Tisch College at Tufts University; Marlboro College President Kevin Quigley; and U.N. Volunteers researcher Ben Lough of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

These panel discussion directed us towards the final goal of the event, which was a multi-stakeholder action campaign calling for ongoing collaboration and policy support to enhance the collective impact of international service in achieving the 2030 goals.

This resolution, which remains a working document, highlighted five major priorities:

1. Engage service abroad programs to more effectively address the 2030 SDGs by mobilizing 10,000 additional service year and short-term volunteers annually and partnerships that leverage local capacity and volunteers in host communities.
2. Promote a new generation of global leaders through global service fellowships promoting service and study abroad.
3. Expand cross-sectorial participation and partnerships.
4. Engage more volunteers of all ages in service abroad.
5. Study and foster best practices across international service programs, measure community impact, and ensure the highest quality of volunteer safety, well-being, and confidence.

Participants agreed that it’s through these types of efforts that volunteer service could become a common strategy throughout the world for meeting pressing challenges. Moreover, the cooperation of individuals and organizations will be vital in laying a foundation on which governments and civil society can build a more prosperous, healthy, and peaceful world.

Event Information

On October 17, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy hosted a discussion with Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan and MIT Professor Barry Posen on U.S. grand strategy. Amid a background of seeming geopolitical upheaval, the discussion focused on whether the United States should pursue a strategy that seeks to maintain U.S. pre-eminence and global leadership or whether the United States can or must adopt a more restrained posture.

In his May 2014 New Republic essay "Superpowers Don't Get to Retire," Kagan argued that the United States has an enduring responsibility and capacity to shape the world order.

Posen is the Ford international professor of political science and director of the security studies program at MIT. He is the author of the new book, Restraint: A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy (Cornell University Press, 2014). Posen argues that consistent U.S. overreaching has led to numerous failures and unexpected problems and cannot be sustained. Posen urges the United States to adopt a strategy of restraint in the future use of U.S. military strength.

Brookings Fellow Jeremy Shapiro moderated the discussion.

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• U.S. Grand Strategy: World Leader or Restrained Power?

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• Uncorrected Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20141017_us_grand_strategy_transcript

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