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POOR-WORLD DEVELOPMENT:
Wringing Success from Failure in Late-Developing Countries - Lessons from the Field
PrefaceThe Golden Gate bridge was high overhead, gleaming bright orange in the setting sun. World War II had been over for two years when my mother, my brother, and I sailed across the Pacific to China. It was 1947, and I was standing on the deck of a recently converted troop ship, the U.S.S. General Gordon. We met my father in war-torn Shanghai and from there flew in a tattered DC-4 to a bomb-cratered dirt strip in Hunan Province for his United Nations small industries assignment. My father's career carried us from Hunan, where we lived from 1947 to 1949; to Jakarta, from 1951 to 1953; to Rangoon in 1956 and 1957; and on to New Delhi, from 1959 to 1961.
A childhood spent in China and other distant places, sandwiched between seaboard passages and innumerable flights, led to a broad perspective and broader aspirations. I did not know then that I would become a willing captive of a government career in the United States Foreign Service, or that being a witness to global poverty would fire a heart-felt commitment to challenge it, which has not dissipated since youthful exposure. What might have been just another American childhood and just another government job became a passion and a continuing source of fascination, pride, and anger. Village China began a life-long love affair with development, and with foreign countries and cultures. I was captivated, even captured, by a chance encounter.
Asia's rice paddies turned from green to gold and to green again with each passing monsoon. Seasonal cycles became timeless. Life abroad in eleven poor countries, first in Asia and then in Africa, and as a visitor to dozens of others, stretched my horizons backward and forward, beyond normal time frames. My adult life as a professional aid practitioner (or aid wallah, a Hindi word for office functionary) exposed me to the immediacy of world poverty and world history. The broad events of a century were imprinted upon me - the colonial land grab of Africa, the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and the end of the cold war - all events that continue to shape the world today.
I write to share my story and my convictions with the American public, and with a younger generation, who may need to be convinced of the value of poor-world development, of foreign aid, and of their own personal commitment to noble goals. I am fortunate to have served development up close. It is my hope, therefore, to convey through this work the lessons I have learned from a career spent wringing success from poverty and failure in the poor world.
My story is drawn primarily from lessons learned during a twenty-five-year career with the United States Agency for International Development (AID). My family and I lived in Bangladesh from 1972 to 1977, in Indonesia from 1979 to 1983 (a second time for me), in Kenya from 1983 to 1987, in Tanzania from 1987 to 1991, and in Zambia from 1994 to 1996. By serving in distant countries that were not at the center of cold war pressures, my assignments enabled me to remain an optimist. I saw turmoil and failure of course, but I also saw first-hand what works when development and aid are effective.
In the relatively short time span of my travels, the population of some countries has nearly tripled. I grew up with indelible impressions created by the explosively growing populations in Asia and Africa. My professional life has been concerned with justice - with, to borrow a phrase from Abraham Lincoln, the sweat of other men's faces. Behind one sweaty face stood millions of others. I recall being bounced along by rickshaw through the crowded, broken streets of Hunan in the late 1940s. Twenty-five years later my family and I witnessed lifeless bodies from Bengal's latest famine being laid gently upon street meridians for carts to carry silently away. Why was there such poverty? We flew regularly from Dhaka to Calcutta in the early 1970s for breaks from oppressive poverty only to be met by an even more desolate reality - a skeletal frame dragging himself along a crowded Calcutta sidewalk to avoid his own excrement.
Constant travel can make a muddle of formal education. Kindergarten by correspondence in China ended with high school by correspondence in New Delhi. I attended an international school in Jakarta, founded by my mother, Antoinette. Her school, conducted first in a sweltering garage, is today the largest of its kind in the world. Ultimately, my travels caught up with me. A freshman year at Yale University suggested that I pursue a more productive course back home in Boulder, Colorado. It was at the University of Colorado that I earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. in economics in 1965 and 1971, respectively, with an M.A. in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1967 sandwiched in between.
The best teacher of all, however, has been the constant exposure to Asia and Africa through trips to the field. My first trip was through the rice paddies of Hunan on a tiger hunt. I carried the rope, my brother Jim, the sack. In Bangladesh years later, my AID colleague, the late Nizam Uddin Ahmed, and I visited farmers' fields across the same flooded plain every month for five years. With each trip impressions and thoughts accumulated and coalesced into lessons and prescriptions.
This book-length story treats development and foreign aid together because aid donors are contributing most of the development resources for poor, late-developing countries. In fact, donors may be funding as much as 100 percent of a poor country's development budget where private talent and private investment are constrained - even driven away. Economists tend to ignore discussions of mismanagement, corruption, poor world dependence on foreign aid, and even democracy. Too often village life has been dramatized in isolation from a national context. Too often multiple and conflicting motives have been ducked or hedged. I have been intimately involved in battles to shape AID's contributions, contradictions, and consequences. Serving AID required challenging the status quo; contributions had to be sorted from myths and mistakes. Where do our foreign aid dollars go? Why should we be concerned about poor Africans when we have our own troubles at home?
There are innumerable questions about development and foreign aid. My subject matter is not complicated but it is diverse; it is simple stuff but not easily simplified. It is best to tell a full story of development and foreign assistance than to cut corners; better to prepare the groundwork fully for understanding and reform than to overlook key actors and forces. This story builds toward a handful of principles that are needed for development and democracy, and for effective foreign aid. Justice demands a telling in full.
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Contact Joe |