betazed said:
I made a post in another thread and thought it really needs its own thread.
From time to time in CFC OT in different threads the issue of Africa and how the world (mostly the western world) should (or should not) help comes up. Many people have many different opinions on it. I thought it would be interesting to know what they are and why they are. So here is a not-so-hypothetical scenario and I ask your opinion on it.
There is a village in sub-Saharan Africa. The population density is low. There are few mud-houses scattered here and there. The nearest town in about 20 miles. There are no road links. 30% of the people in the village suffer from AIDs and 100% of children (and about 75% of the population) suffer from seasonal malaria. The fertility rate in about 5 - 6 per woman. The soil is depleted of nutrients so although farming is done it is barely enough to keep hunger at bay. There is no clean water supply and electricity is unheard of. There are no hospitals or schools either.
Now what exactly do you think we should do (if we should do anything) to help this village and other villages like these which number in thousands in sub-Saharan Africa?
A poll is coming up.
Unfortunately, development, as a field and an industry, simply doesn't work along these sort of technocratic equations, solutions based on them usually fail, sometimes spectacularly. The above paragraphs do not take enough into account, such as the local assets (and there are always some), the local context, history of development in the area, political situation, etc..
Actually, the example is exactly what is wrong with the development field in general. Cookie-cutter technical solutions that are applied with little regard for reality and contextual realities.
First, though, it should be noted that development is an extremely broad and complex field, incorporating a number of disciplines. Unfortunately, it's a highly charged one as well, and, say unlike with electrical engineering, every average joe feels as if they have solution and opinion, but it's just not true, and the last fifty-years of post-WWII development have witnessed a staggering number of development interventions and failures. Most of these are not actually due to "corrupt governments" but because the premise of that sort of aid (termed bilateral aid, gov't to gov't) is usually given for political reasons and not for actual development reasons, think of that sort of aid as birbery or goodwill. Moreover, most gov't aid agencies are bunglers (or worse, witness USAID support for what were little better than concentration camps in Guatemala for instance), such as USAID, due to political appointee leadership and a poor grasp of development theory. There is definitely corruption, but it is blown way of out bounds, mostly to suit the rabble-rousing of right-wingers.
There are all sorts of other types of aid, such as direct food aid, which mostly benefit American big agrobusiness and some shipping interests, who fight hard for subsidies. Unfortunately, food aid projects are rarely implemented correctly, leading, ironically, to the undercutting of local economies (never mind the horrible effect of subsidies to 3rd world farmers everywhere, occasionally leading to farmers turing away from local production due to the food aid turning into lower priced competition and, occasionally, mass starvation, oops!
The rest of aid tends to be a mishmash of international non-government organizations (INGO) and their projects. Now, these are non-governmental organizations, but that doesn't mean they're necessarily better. There are a wide variety of different organizations of varying ability and ideologies. They range from whacko religous-based ones, such as World Vision, which are basically fronts from evangelicalism, to radical NGOs who support social struggle. Take your pick.
This is leaving out the huge field of development theory, which may be for the best as I don't feel like fighting with the neolibs at the moment. I'll just say this, promoting sweatshops as along-term sustainable development is ignorant and naive.
Unfortunately, in a large sense what all this boils down to is experimenting on the poor. The International Development graduate program I just finished is kicking around the idea of implementing a licensing system for practitioners to cut down on the number of technocrats and economic neolibs screwing everything up, the idea being you wouldn't have unlicensed carpenters building Boeing 747's, so you shouldn't have a bunch of unqualified fools running development programs, or being appointed to run them.
