The Foreign Service Journal, December 2016

20 DECEMBER 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL vehicles—one for him or her and their col- leagues and one for guards. The easiest way for a USAIDmid-level officer to visit a project or talk to local offi- cials or leaders is to accompany a delega- tion of “visiting firemen” from the United States. But these photo-opportunity visits are not likely to generate added value in terms of insights into local developments. When a delegation of five to 10 guests in a convoy of vehicles visits a rural water project where 60 villagers are arrayed in a circle under a big tree, and a sign has been put up thanking USAID, you are not going to learn much about what is really going on in the country. Of course, in the end, easing bureau- cratic constraints is a matter of politi- cal will and priorities. If USAID were to embrace more forcefully the need to know more deeply what is going on in a country and the need to build more solid relation- ships with local players, ways would be found to get out and about much more. Recruitment and Deployment Policy Similarly, on the human resource side of things, changes could be made—for instance, in recruitment and deployment policies. The origin of the two-to-four- year posting rule is obscure, but it has (or had) something to do with the fear of “going native,” being co-opted or losing objectivity. Yet some form of going native is exactly what is needed, knowing the language being the obvious first step. Moving fromMoldova to Sri Lanka to Rwanda, and then to Nicaragua, in the course of 15 years is not a recipe for deep understanding or strengthening of lan- guage skills. There is no good reason why this policy could not be seriously revised to allow (and even incentivize) people to stay much longer at a post. And why not recruit more people who already have relevant language skills in the first place? In the 1960s and 1970s, USAID (which was founded in 1961) hired public health specialists, engineers, soil scientists and agricultural economists—people with professional knowledge in their respective field. There were very few degree pro- grams in “development” as a profession. Today there are more than 40 degree programs in the United States that annu- ally produce several thousand technocrats trained in the business of development aid (with specialized degrees in development project management, monitoring and evaluation, or project design). The USAID recruitment process, itself technocratic, is far more geared to looking at these kinds of degrees and, thus, evalu- ating the candidates’ ability to manage the rules of compliance, set up a monitoring matrix or conduct strategic planning than considering their personality or charac- ter, much less their understanding of the complexities of poverty. Ultimately, changing recruitment policy is a matter of corporate culture. Moving from a paint-by-the-numbers approach to a more holistic approach that takes the whole person into account would signal a firmer commitment to the view that USAID’s human resources are central to the agency’s future. Last year USAID had about 9,500 staff in 92 overseas missions and seven regional offices. About 40 percent of these are local staff (who still prefer to be referred to as FSNs, or Foreign Service Nationals, rather than their new, official designation as Locally Employed or LE staff). These people are the backbone of the in-country mission, the agency argues. It is they who have the corporate memory, understand the language and the culture, and know who is who and what is what. This may be so, but the problem is the degree to which they are encouraged and willing to use what they know. In poorer countries, especially, a job with USAID is a coveted one, and not to be put at risk by telling supervising Americans that this or that project won’t work, or that this or that “partner” is a charlatan. Moreover, like mid-level employees in a large bureaucracy anywhere, they know from experience that these superiors will leave in a couple of years, and new initia- tives will come and go. So keeping quiet and doing what one is told is a sensible choice. The Stakes Are High USAID’s “localworks” is a critically important agenda, a much-needed new way of doing its work. But the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is wide, and much of it has to do with the mundane matters discussed here. The political will to change is lacking, and bureaucracies in any case tend to layer new good habits on top of old bad ones rather than shedding the latter. But the stakes are high because the world in which the agency works is chang- ing more rapidly than ever. The “locals” are beginning to push back, demanding that the aid establishment get behind the idea of “country ownership” and start reducing the billions of dollars that go to U.S. firms. (Last year more than $5 billion in USAID subcontracts went to just 30 U.S. firms.) These global changes demand a force of thoughtful and reflective people who are both outgoing and empathetic, and who are freed-up and encouraged to get to know the countries in which they work and listen to those who do know. Above all, they need to be humble and honest about the degree to which “our” solutions to “their” problems are really appropriate. n