AID FOR FAITH

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Jul/Aug 2007 by Baron, Kevin

Funding boosts Christian groups' influence abroad

When I saw the new e-mail from my Washington bureau colleague Farah Stockman, I knew it would tell me the results of her June 2006 visit to a U.S. -funded Christian aid program in a remote Kenyan village.

In a way, a year's worth of work was riding on that e-mail. It was the first report I'd see describing how religious international aid groups were using U.S. funds to operate in the developing world.

In the village, Stockman wrote, the staff of an American evangelical group called Food for the Hungry openly talked about how they teach breastfeeding classes with religious messages, opening and closing sessions with a Christian prayer inside of the village's first tin-roof hut, built with U.S. taxpayers' money.

Since the 1940s, missionaries in this area had little success reaching the nomadic people, but the recent addition of modern health care and U.S. funding seemed to make a difference. Food for the Hungry, a group based in Phoenix, had received $10.9 million over the past five years for various projects in Kenya. Now, nearly everyone in the area who had attended infant nutrition classes had converted to Christianity.

"The first time that I changed my mind is when we were learning the health education, and our teacher was also talking about God," a tribal mother said. "We used to go to the rivers and pour milk for the god who stays in the mountain. But I learned through our classes that that is a very tiresome god. Now we have known that you don't need to struggle to please God. Now I have learned through health education that God is everywhere."

Stockman's report eventually became the lead for our four-day series called "Exporting Faith," the sum of an 18-month investigation by The Boston Globe's Washington bureau into the foreign aid impact of President Bush's Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.

With a budget of approximately $8 billion each year, the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, is charged with providing humanitarian and economic development aid while promoting U.S. foreign policy abroad. An army of nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, such as Catholic Relief Services or the American Red Cross, bid for multimillion dollar contracts and grants to launch planeloads of relief supplies and long-term development programs such as training foreign public health officials.

Christian missionaries and relief organizations had long been in the business of saving the world, often with U.S. taxpayer funding. When Bush established the Center for Faith Based & Community Initiatives at USAID in 2002, religious groups stood to receive a windfall of new contracts to run government aid programs. More than a dozen such offices opened since 2001 in various executive branch agencies to work with current and potential faithbased contractors and grantees. The Bush administration says it is only seeking to level the playing field for religious groups who have been wrongly discriminated against in contracting decisions. The initiative was created to "remove barriers" the administration alleges existed, such as confusion among USAID staff over the rules allowing religious groups to receive and spend U.S. funds.

I wanted to know who got the contracts and what were they preaching overseas. I had two basic questions. How much money does USAID spend on faith-based organizations and who are they? USAID's reply: We don't know.

I needed an accurate list of USAID's faith-based contractors. With all of the hype surrounding the faithbased initiative, I assumed someone at USAID had the job of tracking all that government money. But I was wrong. A 2005 White House report published a total for such spending, but it was slim and incomplete. I would have to start from scratch.

I filed a FOIA request with USAID asking for a copy of their raw database of all prime awards (contracts, grants, cooperative agreements) from fiscal 2001 through the current date (mid- August) in fiscal 2005. I thought some simple Google searches would identify which contractors were faith-based and create a new database.

But the FOIA requests yielded spreadsheets containing more than 50,000 records, each showing a dollar amount awarded to a contractor or grantee between Oct. 1, 2000, and Aug. 15, 2005. With the help of Boston University journalism graduate student Rushmie Kalke and freelance researcher Laura Peterson, I spent the next three months going down the list from A-to-Z and identifying faith-based organizations one-by-one. We also identified a control group of secular NGOs.

In November 2005, Washington bureau chief Peter S. Canellos and I set out for Louisville, Ky., to attend a conference called "Global Medical Missionaries." Hosted by an evangelical megachurch, the event drew 1,000 attendees and included some of the leading contractors emerging in my data. We settled in for a keynote speech by Richard Steams, the president of World Vision, the faith-based contractor receiving the second highest amount of USAID funds.