“What questions do policymakers ask about foreign aid?” by Sam Anschell

I sit down with Lee Jae-jeong, one of the 21 parliamentarians on South Korea's Foreign Affairs and Unification Committee. The National Assembly budget audit looms, and our conversation could impact the next year of Korea's health aid. I walk through a 5-minute presentation (stopping intermittently for translation) about Gavi's new malaria vaccines and why we at Coefficient Giving think so highly of them. She furrows her brow while she flips through the printed leave-behind I brought. What does she want to know? I’ve had dozens of similar conversations with Japanese and Korean lawmakers as a representative of Coefficient Giving's Global Aid Policy program. Our team's goals are to grow the scale of wealthy countries’ development assistance, and direct this money to more cost-effective aid programs. Given our lean staffing model, we’re limited in the amount of direct advocacy we ourselves can do. However, after funding local aid advocacy groups in Japan and Korea, we learned that meeting with policymakers in person helps to build relationships, strengthen educational advocacy, and provide international validation for our grantees’ work. At a time of deep cuts across major aid donors, it can be easy to imagine appropriators as heartless gatekeepers who withhold [...] --- Outline: (02:05) Geopolitics (03:51) Values (04:38) Pragmatism --- First published: April 6th, 2026 Source: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts , or another podcast app.