My Sunday magazine piece a week ago on young Americans engaging in do-it-yourself foreign aid projects sparked a good bit of reaction, including some thoughtful criticisms. You can read the comments below the previous blog post to get a flavor. Let me try to address some of the complaints.  The first is that DIY aid tends to be unsustainable and poorly thought-out, and thus isn’t particularly effective and is occasionally harmful. These projects sometimes peter out when the founder moves on, and there often aren’t mechanisms to insure accountability. Aid workers with established NGO’s made these points, as did a post on the Foreign Policy blog, as did this commenter on my own blog:  I have seen countless foreigners pledge financial support to various groups, and then run out of money and quite rapidly abandon the project. More relevant to this story, three times I have seen failed schools and orphanages built by well-meaning American and European women on lump sums of money. The sustainability of these institutions was not the concern when these women had their ‘ah-ha!’ moment and decided they must open a school, an orphanage, a training program on their own, before properly learning about Nepal itself. When these women ran out of funds and lost visas, this caused ultimate failure and disappointment for the children already adjusted to and benefiting from a better standard of living and a greater sense of hope.  There’s something to this. Compared to professionals, amateurs tend to be more, well, amateurish. Accountability can be a real problem. But on the whole, I think this concern is misstated. I’ve generally found that grassroots, locally owned aid projects have a better record than large scale, top-down ones that don’t always have the same buy-in. And the truth is that DIY aid projects are more likely to be modest, grassroots efforts undertaken with strong local partners. They often keep their ear to the ground and tinker with their model more than the larger projects. Aid projects often succeed at the experimental level and then have difficulty going to scale, but that’s less of an issue with DIY investments that are never meant to scale up (that’s a separate problem with them, and a legitimate concern).  In short, it’s complicated. Some little aid projects screw up, and some big ones screw up. DIY projects run out of money, and so do big ones. Indeed, one of the central problems with aid funding is that it is often year by year. That’s an appalling way to finance development, since recipient governments can’t be sure what is going to come down the pike once they start something. But that’s at least as much of a problem with government funding as with DIY funding.  I want to be clear that I’m not dissing big aid organizations. I have huge respect for them. In my travels I often visit their projects, and they have a sophistication and scalability that DIY efforts can’t match. It’s hard to think of any group in the aid world that had more impact than UNICEF under Jim Grant in the 1980’s with the child survival revolution. But he had to battle World Health Organization every step of the way, and Grant himself was something of a social entrepreneur. The point is that fresh blood and ideas are a hugely important complement to the existing structure — just as venture capital and support for start-ups like Apple doesn’t mean hostility to IBM and the stock and bond markets. They each have their roles.  Moreover, the start-ups sometimes become the big players. BRAC is the gold standard of development organizations today, and it was started by a social entrepreneur, Fazle Abed, only in the early 1970’s. Thank God Fazle didn’t join the UN system and become the FAO rep in Djibouti.  Some of the comments from professionals also betray what, to me, seems like a hint of educational snobbishness: because the DIY-ers don’t have advanced degrees, they’re not going to succeed. Look, I’m on the Harvard board and believe in academic snobbishness as much as the next person — but overall I’d have to say that grassroots experience and approach matter in aid work more than degrees. Some church-run aid projects (e.g. by local Catholic churches) have a terrific record, because they’re run by priests and nuns who stay on site for decades, speak local languages and put local people in charge. And frankly, I always find micro-economists better on development than macro-economists, because the micro folks have spent a frustrating year or two in the middle of nowhere working on their dissertations, realizing that nothing ever works as it’s supposed to in the classrooms.  Another objection to the DIY piece is that it focused on Americans going abroad, fitting into a narrative of the white foreigner swooping in and rescuing the person of color. As one commenter put it on the blog:  I can’t beleive there is no mention of any personality from the developing world, except for a mere reference to SEWA. The article is such a western-centric view of development, where the ‘poor helpless women’ in the developing countries are ‘rescued’ by these ‘altruistic-minded’ women from the development world. And the story about the menstruation pad –was so condescending. Women in developing countries have found home remedies to replace sanitary napkins for centuries and their method is can be more environmentally friendly.  This is something that often bugs people, and it’s a fair criticism: the social entrepreneurship revolution is as active in India and Africa as in America. There’s also a risk that the conversation becomes about how to rescue Africa, rather than how to help Africans who must lead the way themselves. (Frankly, I always worry that a focus on Sudan and Eastern Congo and other particularly troubled countries leads to a misperception that all of Africa is a mess, a view that is not only unfair but also hurts investment and tourism.) Then again, I’m writing for a mostly American audience, and I’m writing not about development as such but about Americans doing work in development. And the truth is that it’s already extraordinarily difficult to get readers to focus on needs half a world away; one way to do so, is to use Americans as bridge characters. Without them, even fewer people will focus on these issues.  Frankly, lack of interest is likely to become more serious. I think America is turning inward again because of our economic difficulties. Many Americans see huge needs around them and don’t see why we should worry about Africa or Asia when our own needs are so striking. I wonder if the period after 9/11 will be seen as an anomaly in which we were focused on international issues before a reversion to the more common historical trendline in which we largely tune out much of the world outside our borders.
Readers had some thoughtful criticisms of my magazine essay on DIY foreign aid. Here's my attempt to respond.