(Letter to the Editor)
Development Forum, Vol .20, No.5, Sept. – Oct. 1992.
Dear Editor,
I have been following your coverage of the ongoing efforts by aid organizations to make their development programs more effective. I think there are weaknesses in the Western project approach to development which calls for a serious reappraisal of development assistance programs.
Since the late 1950s, when Western donor governments adopted the project-oriented modality of development (*) assistance to the Third World, the agenda of funding institutional development has been largely donor-controlled, placing emphasis on compartmentalized, short-term, top-down, capital-intensive efforts. Third World countries became more assistance package-takers than package-makers.
(*): Derived from the past development experience had by Western capitalist countries at the turn of the century, this modality compartmentalizes development tasks into discrete sectors and into rather short-term tine locks; among others, it stresses technological over political solutions, capital-intensive over labor-intensive approaches, impact over process, supply over access to and utilization of resources and trickle-down over redistribution.
As a result, projects most often create a push rather than a pull situation to achieve contractually set objectives. What this means is that contractors brought in to collaborate in carrying out the project more often than not push local structures to achieve these objectives rather than let their local counterparts be the movers of the process.
This donor-dominated project approach, which continues to form the broad basis of the present development cooperation model, is at least in part responsible for meagre resources set aside by developing countries to support project outputs once external funding ceases. Insufficient local funding hampers a process that might otherwise build on the experiences gained during the course of the project.
Projects should be catalysts for the emergence of programs that are eventually funded by national recurrent budgets and move away from the donors’ perspective of more short-term interventions. Furthermore. by favoring expensive consultants from the donors’ home country (100.000 of them in Africa alone), this approach falls short of taking full advantage of the irreplaceable insights of local professionals.
By defining success in terms of the projects. Western donors encourage project consultants to be much more accountable to the donor than to the host institution: credit for project outputs thus tends to be given to them and not the host institution
Alternatively, a longer-term, perhaps closer to 10-year, project is needed in development assistance to the Third World. Two-to three-year projects often just stir the waters leaving little behind. A “working-with”, rather than a “working-for” project attitude needs to be at the core of new approaches. Responsibility for the running of activities have to be shifted to local counterparts as early as possible and as a stated objective from the beginning; progressive recurrent government funding for the activities under the project (even if modest) should be a conditionality negotiated from the outset. Even the name “project” should be replaced by a more process-oriented term, perhaps as a “joint venture”.
Claudio Schuftan. M.D.
Saigon, VIETNAM
schuftan@gmail.com