The Foreign Service Journal, June 2006

development takes time, and usually open-ended time. 2. The role and position of NGOs. Up through the late 1970s, the world of U.S. NGOs in develop- ment assistance was a peripheral one. They were run by dedicated people who worked for little money (recall the word “voluntary” in the now-less-used term Private Volun- tary Organization). They often work- ed close to the grassroots in the field (they emphasized “community par- ticipation” in project planning long before the concept was formalized in the aid establishment). They rarely showed up at meetings in Washington. They were too busy and, in any case, couldn’t really afford the price of the airfare or hotel. Only a few had a working relationship with the U.S. aid establishment. In 1988, there were 205 American NGOs registered with USAID. By 1996 that number had grown to 439. Today there are 533 U.S. NGOs registered with USAID, plus 59 international NGOs. All of these are listed in the USAID Private Voluntary Organization Registry so that they can apply for a piece of the official aid pie. Today their IQCs and contracts are not much different than those concluded with for-profit contracting firms, and even small NGOs maintain Washington offices. Meanwhile, some of them have become giants: for example, CARE, with an annual budget of over $600 mil- lion; Save the Children, at $271 million; and World Vision, at $807 million. They are now large bureaucracies, with large public relations and marketing staffs. And even though the giants rely largely on private money for their budgets, they continue to maintain a healthy relationship with USAID, in part because federal money is cheaper (getting a million-dollar USAID contract uses less mar- keting energy than getting a $10,000 private gift), and in part because it usually allows a percentage to be used for operational overhead, while private money is more restricted. There are other NGOs, however, with budgets in the $5-million to $20-million range, that depend more heavily on USAID for 15 to 40 percent of their operating budgets, making them “quangos” (for quasi-NGOs). Whatever potential the American NGO world might have had to act as a critical counterpoint to the official aid bureaucracy has been dissipated, if not entirely lost. The independent, nimble, committed, on-the-ground NGO is today more of a myth than ever. Instead, a large number of NGOs depend on busi- ness as usual. 3. The dominance of money in the public debate about de- velopment. From the Monterrey Consensus and Tony Blair’s Africa Commission report, to Jeffrey Sachs’ (and Kofi Annan’s) Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Develop- ment Goals (United Nations, 2005) and rock star Bono’s private meetings with George W. Bush, the central mes- sage has been that development efforts to reduce poverty will only succeed “when we get more money” (the calls range from doubling to quadrupling today’s worldwide aid budget). It is close to impossible today to make reasoned argu- ments about alternative ways to foster development in the face of all this noise. The late British economist P.T. Bauer’s comment about the misguided belief in money as the answer went unheeded 15 years ago; today it is not even dimly heard: “To have capital is the result of eco- nomic achievement, not its precondition.” Of course there is a role for resources, but there is just no compelling argument for increasing what we already have, especially if we look at the history of development aid. Money has been more of a problem than a solution. It has created or at least encouraged dependency and cor- ruption, and certainly has diverted our attention from the hard lessons we have learned. As aid has become more and more about resources, those resources seem to be tied as much to the perpetuation of the aid industry — its contractors and its employees — as they are tied to the supposed beneficiaries. Is the money for us, or is the money for “them”? 4. Development aid as a profession and a career. The evolution of development assistance into a full- fledged profession has created a set of stakeholders whose interests are at base opposed to adapting the lessons we have learned. Only business as usual — especially if the calls for more money are heeded — makes it possible for aid agencies to grow and thus absorb new people. The more aid projects there are — and especially the more they are about resources (money and things), the more F O C U S J U N E 2 0 0 6 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 33 What is needed now are more supple, longer-term efforts that are “cargo- less,” and where some of what is transferred has to be paid for.