An Alliance for Global Development

When Prime Minister Cameron meets President Obama in Washington today it will have been ten months since our two countries signed a new Partnership for Global Development. The partnership outlines specific areas where we are focusing our collective efforts, reaffirming our commitment to saving lives and improving human welfare around the world.

If you needed proof of how much more we can achieve by working together than acting alone, our response to the food crisis in the Horn of Africa demonstrates the transformative impact of our partnership.

Over the last ten months, USAID and the UK’s Department for International Development‘s (DFID) leadership and decisive action in the region has helped avert an even larger catastrophe. As heads of our nations’ respective development agencies, we have both visited the Horn of Africa and seen for ourselves the scale of the crisis, which placed more than 13.3 million people in need of emergency assistance. That is roughly the combined population of London and Washington. (Watch this video of Rajiv Shah and Dr. Jill Biden’s visit to the Horn of Africa last year)

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Through President Obama’s Feed the Future initiative, USAID is partnering with governments, the private sector and smallholder farmers across 20 countries to boost crop yields and strengthen food security.

But in order for this to work, we need to bring the global development community together to focus on long-term, sustainable agriculture development. A major first step in this direction will occur later this month when East African Ministers will meet and agree a Common Program Framework to End Drought Emergencies. Setting out a range of measures to strengthen resilience, the framework will provide a basis for mobilizing and co-coordinating the work of thedonors in the region. USAID, with UK support, has been actively working to make this meeting a success.

• Continue reading the full post on The White House Blog
• Read the White House fact sheet on how the U.S. & UK are parterning for global development
• Read an Op-Ed in The Washington Post by President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron