Canada’s foreign aid program has its problems, but they are hardly unique. Nor are they the fault of a single agency.

During a conversation with a South African friend this summer, he told me, “you Canadians tend to beat up on CIDA [Canadian International Development Agency] a lot. But many of the criticisms I’ve heard are neither CIDA- nor Canada-specific."

I was reminded of my friend’s comments earlier this week when the Auditor General released her annual fall report, which included a chapter on CIDA. The report concluded that frequent changes in policy and priorities and a lack of clear direction have hampered the agency’s ability to deliver foreign aid more effectively.

CIDA certainly deserves a good share of the blame for the shortcomings of Canada’s $5-billion foreign aid program. (The revelation that in 2007 it took CIDA, on average, 43 months to get projects approved is clearly indefensible.) But it is unfair and misleading to apportion all the blame to the agency.

CIDA is the federal government’s lead agency in delivering official development assistance (ODA) – or foreign aid as most Canadians know it. But it is only one of many federal organizations involved. In fact, a September 2009 report to Parliament detailed the ODA activities and expenditures of 12 different federal departments, not including the Treasury Board or the Prime Minister’s Office which also influence the directions and priorities for foreign aid. As a former CIDA ministerial staffer put it, “CIDA has most of the money but much of the power lies elsewhere.”

This diffusion of authority is compounded by another problem that has existed virtually since CIDA was established in 1968; it has been given multiple, often muddled and ever changing mandates.

Most Canadians probably think that foreign aid is about fighting poverty in poor countries. That view is reinforced by CIDA’s stated mission to “lead Canada’s international effort to help people living in poverty.”

While poverty eradication has always been an important objective of Canadian ODA, it has never been the only one. Over the years, we have used ODA spending to further Canada’s diplomatic, political, and commercial interests. Canadian farmers and engineering firms have been significant beneficiaries of ODA spending, for example, by the requirement that recipients of foreign aid purchase goods and services from Canadian suppliers.

Afghanistan probably offers the best current example of the way in which we use foreign aid to achieve a variety of objectives. Currently the largest recipient of Canadian foreign aid, Afghanistan will have received about $1.2 billion between 2002 and 2011. And yet Afghanistan, with a population no larger than Canada’s, has a very, very small percentage of the world’s poor. Clearly, we are using ODA expenditures in Afghanistan to accomplish other aims. While those goals may very well further Canada’s national interests, foreign aid funding may not be the most appropriate way to finance them.

As my friend from South Africa reminded me, many of the shortcomings of our foreign aid program – diffused authority and multiple mandates, being only two – are not unique to Canada. In fact, other countries are trying to wrestle with these same challenges in ways that might inform our efforts to improve the delivery of Canadian foreign aid.

The U.S. offers one such example. In July of this year, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton established the Quadrennial Review of Diplomacy and Development that will require the State Department and USAID – CIDA’s counterpart – to demonstrate how they intend to integrate U.S. foreign policy and development objectives. As a complement to Clinton’s initiative, an even broader review was launched a month later by President Obama. In August, Obama formally established a Presidential Study on U.S. Global Development Policy. This study will take place under the leadership of the National Security Advisor and will engage at least 15 different U.S. agencies.

These two parallel initiatives are still in their early days and may amount to nothing. But they do represent an attempt by our U.S. neighbours to address many of the same challenges that confront Canada. Perhaps most important of all, they reflect an understanding that the solutions required to establish an effective foreign aid program go way beyond the purview of one single agency or department.

While addressing the problems at CIDA as outlined in the Auditor General’s report is clearly important, that, in and of itself, will be insufficient to ensure the effective delivery of Canadian foreign aid.