The Foreign Service Journal, June 2006

tion. The lack of results is distinct- ly on the developmental side of the balance sheet. Half of the world’s population (3 billion people) live on $2 a day or less. One billion do not have access to clean water (despite a commitment made by the ad- vanced nations that there be clean water for all by 1990). In 1978, the world’s donor nations resolved to see to it that primary health care be fully available to all by 2000. We are still not anywhere near that goal. Roads and other projects we built years ago are in ruin or disrepair in many countries. Poverty in much of Africa is as bad as, or worse than, ever. Where there has been significant poverty reduction (e.g., China), it has had little to do with aid; and where direct aid has dominated, we have seen little lasting pover- ty reduction. We have seen how often well-meaning anti- poverty projects get captured by corrupt officials, bureau- cratic red tape and local elites. We have seen how easy it is to create dependency in the midst of a rhetoric of self- reliance; and how even brilliantly-conceived, well-execut- ed projects come to naught in a context of political insta- bility, underdeveloped or nonexistent infrastructure and lack of human capital. Most important, we have seen how incredibly tricky it is to figure out how to leave behind something sustainable after “the project” is over and, thus, how easy it is to succumb to the temptation to make the day-to-day accounting for development “cargo” substitute for development — as if the accounting for seeds, hoes, tractors, pumps, pipes, hours of consultant time, vehicles, numbers of agricultural extension officers “trained” and, more recently, microcredit loans processed were all we needed to prove we had done our jobs well. Our discomfort is often tempered by the tendency to say, Wait a minute, didn’t we eradicate smallpox? Aren’t we on the way to controlling guinea worm and trachoma? Aren’t we finally seeing progress (in places like Uganda) against HIV/AIDS? Haven’t we inoculated millions of kids against many diseases? Haven’t we prevented the starvation of millions more through food donations? What about those bags of wheat USAID used to unload in countless counties, the ones with the handshake logo and the words (in several languages) “Gift of the People of the United States”? Didn’t these things make a difference? Of course they did — in the short term and on a one-to-one basis. But they didn’t lead to development in the real sense of the term; i.e., economic growth and lasting poverty reduction. In virtually all of the poorest nations of the world (the Nigers, the Haitis, the Malawis — those coun- tries in which the aid portion of the budget dominates) the picture after decades of assistance is em- barrassing, to say the least. In Guinea (Conakry), for example, the national railroad grid has literally disappeared: the tracks are gone or buried under silt and vegetation and the rolling stock is in ruins. In many of the poorest countries, the precariousness of daily existence has increased to the point where the clam- or to leave is intense, especially among young people. This is “voting with one’s feet” in the worst way because this desire to leave represents the people’s “report card” on the country’s future. Many of us in the field began to realize long ago that institutions are more important than resources; that lack of absorptive capacity is a killer constraint; and that aid should be a support and not the name of the game itself. But we hardly ever saw our agencies take that knowl- edge on board. Aligning Practice with Rhetoric Today official doctrine belatedly reflects these reali- ties. So what would aid programs based on an appreci- ation of these realities look like? Here are just a few examples of the innovations implied in the new rhetoric. First, they would not be direct, time-bound “projects.” Such projects may fit well with direct interventions like community water systems, farmer-to-farmer programs, irrigation, soil improvement, livestock, maternal and child health, microcredit, fisheries and so on, but increas- ingly they are anachronisms. No matter how enlightened they look on paper — with their emphasis on stakehold- er participation, capacity building and even on policy for- mulation — outsider-funded and outsider-designed pro- jects tend to be engineered down to the smallest detail. And, once launched, the objective becomes filling in the boxes in the quarterly workplan or log frame (now called the “results framework”). It ends up being about check- F O C U S 30 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 6 Most important, we have seen how incredibly tricky it is to figure out how to leave behind something sustainable after “the project” is over.