It is easy to be discouraged by foreign aid efforts. Too often it seems that there is not enough money, the projects aren't sustainable enough, local people aren't involved enough...the list of "not enoughs" could go on for a long time.
When I find myself feeling cynical about the woes of international development, I normally think about some of the amazing projects I have experienced with Outreach International. Today I found another great source of hope that we are actually learning something...that there are other people and groups that are creating sustainable good as well. On Aid Watch, William Easterly (author of White Man's Burden) writes about a micro-finance project in Ghana that exemplified the main principle that we advocate for on this blog, the participation of local people in their own development.
Easterly essentially described how Outreach International works (without knowing it):
"One approach to a successful aid project just is to immerse yourself in the local community, put local people in charge who are themselves highly motivated, be adaptive and flexible to respond to whatever the local people think about how they can help themselves, so that you customize the “standard project designs” to fit local circumstances. Most aid projects fail because there is nobody in the field making all these necessary adaptations and fixing unanticipated problems as they arise. The moral of the story is: be a Searcher and not a Planner."
One story that I thought really demonstrated the effectiveness of this method is from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The story, From Wishing to Wells, helps me to realize again that even in the most desperate circumstances, putting people in charge of their own development and empowering with them with the tools to change their communities, WORKS!
-Stephen Donahoe
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