The Foreign Service Journal, January 2004

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 59 ject I was responsible for was to be based. At that time, there was no highway, the heat was intense, most of the area was desert, and the population was highly impover- ished. Why would anyone in his right mind want to go there? The few government officials who did work in the region regarded it as a form of exile, and because of the difference in social status between them and the locals, they were not fully aware of just how bad conditions were. Nor were they keen to find out. Nevertheless, the officials had plenty of statistics and baseline stud- ies at their fingertips. For instance, they assured us that a census had just been taken and that there were 5,000 children in the area without access to schools. When we actually went to the communities to talk to our future clients, however, we had to leave the jeep behind and walk several miles up the mountains where coffee was grown and down into coastal areas where the sugar cane was cut in order to reach the remote villages. The census takers had not done this and six months into the project we discovered there were actually 250,000 children in the area without access to schools! This misinformation was extraordinarily costly; for example, we would have been better off from a cost and outreach perspective to use available satellite technol- ogy rather than repeater radio signal towers. (But we stuck with the towers, by the way.) Even when background data are reliable, site visits should still be made by the people who are going to do the actual work, not by “project designers” who draft a project paper and then leave. Making matters worse, all too often the project designed by one so-called “expert” is carried out by another “expert.” The designer never understands why his or her plan wasn’t actually carried out and the per- son implementing the project thinks that the original design was clearly insane. (Both are correct, of course.) Money should be budgeted so that the future project workers can travel to the area and experience the actual con- ditions they will be working in for long enough to check the accuracy of the available reports. In that way, we can avoid doing projects that will cease to exist when the money runs out and the foreigners leave — as happens all too often when the strategic decisions about a program are made over dinner in an air-conditioned hotel back in the capital. Ultimately, however, it’s the people carrying out the project who make it work — or fail. International aid agencies usually don’t recruit monomaniacs with mission- ary zeal, but that’s what it takes to turn a short-term project into a self-sustaining institution. An entrepreneurial type is ideal for this because he or she has the motivation to cre- ate something out of nothing. But the agencies prefer cooler types with a Ph.D. (the more specialized, the bet- ter). Most host countries like the Ph.D.s, too, because they show the international agency is sending its “best” people. But speaking as a Ph.D.-holder myself, I have to admit we aren’t always the best choice. We are used to competent support staff, telephones and computers that work, a social setting much like a corpora- tion or university, and cultural amenities like movies and restau- rants and museums. We are often overspecialized and not too concerned about what are properly called business and political matters. We also like abstractions and are sometimes unaccustomed to address- ing practical problems like project workers stealing gaso- line, or selling powdered milk meant for malnourished children on the black market, or figuring out how to reach a given community when it’s flooded four months out of the year. Sure, you need to know what you are doing but that doesn’t necessarily mean you need a Ph.D. to do it. Personally, I think some of my best preparation for over- seas work took place on the streets of the low-income neighborhood in the Bronx where I grew up. The Host Government There are lots of reasons why the governments of Third World countries want international projects. Sometimes they want them for the cash or the physical inputs (i.e., equipment). Or they may want to curry favor for a devel- opment loan they are seeking. In some countries, it may be for the prestige. In our case, in the Dominican Republic, it was because the population in the targeted region were now voting in significant numbers and the government wanted to show those voters that it was con- cerned and was actually helping their children. Finally, it may be, as it was with our project, that one Institution-building is central to a country’s social and economic growth.