Ivanka is a front

As Ivanka Trump traveled the world talking up the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, a whole-of-government women’s empowerment initiative, deep problems were developing in the implementation of the bipartisan Women’s Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act of 2018.

Trump’s stump speech on the global conference circuit was anchored in stories about the legal and regulatory barriers many women face around the world in establishing their property rights and starting businesses, and she had a solution: W-GDP.

Supporters of W-GDP saw it as a groundbreaking whole-of-government approach to female empowerment, while critics of the new law derided it as too limited to make a real difference.

The plan was to mandate and codify gender analysis and deliver targeted finance across the women’s programs of 10 U.S. Government agencies.

[...]

One of the 10 agencies involved was the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is mandated by the WEEE Act to allocate $265 million a year for support to micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises. Half of the money is required to go to women, half to the very poor (some overlap between the two groups is expected).

[...]

While USAID launched at least 19 new women’s empowerment programs in 2019 alone, there were extensive failures in both the targeting of the money, and the measurement of its impact.

USAID was unable to say what proportion of funds went to the very poor and women-owned and managed businesses. Shockingly, the agency couldn’t even define what actually constitutes a business owned and run by women, the GAO concluded.

[...]

One of Ivanka Trump’s favorite anecdotes about women’s empowerment on global conference stages from New York to Doha focused on her efforts to empower Colombian women, whom she visited in September 2019 with USAID administrator Mark Green. The American and Colombian governments went as far as to issue a joint communique on their shared vision.

[...]

“USAID has not defined and does not collect information necessary to meet its statutory targeting requirements” the report noted, including by failing to obtain survey responses from 26 of its 47 bureaus around the world on how they distributed funding.

The GAO’s six recommendations for USAID focus on establishing new internal processes that can provide “reasonable assurance” that the money allocated by Congress gets to its intended recipients.

  Politico

Oh, it DOES. Do you never wonder why other countries claim US AID is an infiltration device cloaked as an aid agency?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.