Faith-based Foreign Aid

Faith-based foreign aid refers to the international development and relief-related spending and activities of religious or religiously-motivated organizations, and the government financial and political support of those organizations.

For centuries, Western religious groups, who often accompanied and financed early explorers, colonists and conquerors, also contributed money and services to help people in need around the world. Today, many so-called faith-based nongovernment organizations, or NGOs, exist to provide development or disaster-relief services in developing countries, often with significant backing from the taxpayer dollars of Western donor governments.

Critics question the mingling of economic, health, or other types of aid with the motivation of religious development groups, nearly all of which are Christian, often seeking conversions and threatening indigenous beliefs and cultural practices. Defenders credit Christian development and missionary groups for reaching people like no other groups can, due to historical networks, such as Africa's churches, and providing top quality services, often in health and education. Some, however, consider faith-based foreign aid to be a modern-day extension of religious colonialism, with morality often dangerously mixed with critical development concerns, especially global health education, prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, economic security and other issues.

While "faith-based" political issues have been covered extensively by US news agencies, especially related to domestic issues, the crossroads of religious international development and US foreign aid has received little media attention.

Notably, a four-day Boston Globe special report, published in October 2006, called "Exporting Faith", that examined the expansion of US foreign aid funding going to religious organizations under President Bush's faith-based initiative. The result of an 18-month investigation conducted by the Globe's Washington bureau, the report analyzed more than 50,000 government funding awards by the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, over 5 years of the Bush administration. The Globe discovered that the share of US foreign aid dollars for aid organizations that was going religious groups had doubled, from 10 percent to nearly 20 percent, totaling more than $1.7 billion. Of those funds for so-called "faith-based" organizations, 98% went to Christian groups. Globe journalists reported from Kenya, Angola, Pakistan, Washington and the American heartland on the politics and practices of American Christian development workers spreading across the developing world with the help of US taxpayer funds, often leading the way to remote locations where there is little to no monitoring or evaluating by the federal government.