I couldn’t agree more with my colleague William EASTERLY. Trying to concentrate on some of his ideas, I made a short list of his valuable points:

(1) Over the past five decades, the West has donated US$2.3 trillion in foreign aid to poor countries. Most of this money has been funneled into a series of grand plans to eradicate poverty…

(2) African children are still dying of malaria for sleeping without a mosquito net and for lack of 12 US cent medicines that could treat them once infected. Of course, aid has helped, mainly through piecemeal efforts such as oral rehydration therapy to counteract the effects of diarrhoea, or with sanitation projects. It is this type of success that is more feasible than a grand plan aiming, for example, to provide everyone in the world with clean water by 2015.

(3) Although the West’s ambitious plans to end poverty are well intended, they are doomed to failure by an apparent refusal to learn from previous mistakes, their unaccountability and because they try to solve everything at once. It’s time for a re-think. Aid programmes must be driven by economic principles: find out what is in demand, rather than assuming what poor people need. Ensure that aid actually reaches the people it’s aimed at. Rather than planning what Western aid should do, we should find out what it can do.

(4) Small-scale, piecemeal plans are far more likely to succeed and be taken up by local communities.

(5) Big plans may garner public support, but they can backfire as a cynical backlash if their promises are not kept. By contrast, public goodwill is generated when many poor people are seen to benefit through smaller, accountable initiatives.

(6) …let aid agencies find their own methods for specific interventions (rather than having them dictated from the top) and let them be accountable for their results through independent evaluation.

(7) One approach would be to use development vouchers for the extremely poor, which could be redeemed at any aid agency for benefits such as vaccinations, textbooks or seeds.

…………

As “the West has donated US$2.3 trillion in foreign aid to poor countries”… isn’t that an awfull lot of money for the actual achievements? I am convinced that, if this mountain of dollars had been spent for a larger part on programs like vaccinations (UNICEF?), education (construction of class rooms and sanitary installations, decent payment of teachers and vulgarization workers, textbooks, stationery…), and construction of small family gardens and school gardens, to name but these, it would have thrown a different light on today’s “partial success” of the MDGs.

The remarkable successes booked with mosquito nets, anti-malaria medicines, oral rehydration therapy to counteract the effects of diarrhoea and other sanitation projects should be nice examples of “best practices” to be multiplied at a global scale. However, why is it so difficult to convince “decision-makers”, foundations, sponsors, rock stars, etc. to concentrate their efforts on such success stories? Who is for instance understanding the “urgent need” to eradicate poverty in the Third World by offering cell phones and wireless to the poor rural people (see former messages on this blog), instead of teaching them how to produce their own food by combining traditional methods with modern and cost-effective agricultural and horticultural technologies? (”Don’t send them food, but teach them how to grow it“).

You are fully right, William Easterly, in saying that: “It’s time for a re-think. Aid programmes must be driven by economic principles: find out what is in demand, rather than assuming what poor people need. Ensure that aid actually reaches the people it’s aimed at. Rather than planning what Western aid should do, we should find out what it can do”. The most important thing in demand is FOOD, because malnutrition leads automatically to poor health and thus to a number of diseases. What’s the sense of vaccinating children if they are subject to chronic malnutrition? Take the example of those poor kids in the refugee camps, chronically undernourished and too weak to resist the harsh conditions of the environment in which their families live. Do they really need a free cell phone or a wireless, like some interested people declare? Never in those conditions! Let us offer instead more opportunities to aid agencies to set up “small-scale, piecemeal plans that are far more likely to succeed and be taken up by local communities“. Let us follow the example of UNICEF ALGERIA, building family gardens and school gardens in refugee camps to improve drastically the standards of living of the children and adults, who lived for years without decent fresh food.

I also take Easterly’s point that “public goodwill is generated when many poor people are seen to benefit through smaller, accountable initiatives“. Here is a good example of it: many Europeans got already tired of being invited by numerous NGOs, year after year, to offer some financial contribution for their aid actions. One of the reasons for this “growing reticence” is the lack of “visibility of the results” of that panoply of aid actions all over the world.

But when we recently launched in Belgium the collection of seeds of melon, watermelon, pumpkin, papaya, sweet pepper and avocado, people and the media reacted very positively. Today, I am submerged with seeds. I will take them personally to the family gardens and school gardens of the UNICEF project in Algeria. And that is what the Belgians seemingly like very much in this “new, small and accountable initiative”: they can see the immediate benefit of growing fresh fruits in small gardens, using the seeds that would otherwise be thrown in their garbage bin. Ask the Belgians one single Euro to buy some seeds for a project in the developing world and many will hesitate. But ask them to produce an effort to dry some seeds and to pay for a stamp to send them, and they cooperate a minute later, telling us how nice this “idea” is. What a wonderful experience! What a lesson learned!

Hopefully this example speaks for itself. I am very thankful for William Easterly’s suggestions:

* … let aid agencies find their own methods for specific interventions (rather than having them dictated from the top) and let them be accountable for their results through independent evaluation.

and

* One approach would be to use development vouchers for the extremely poor, which could be redeemed at any aid agency for benefits such as vaccinations, textbooks or seeds.

May our voices be heard for it is “Time for a grand re-think of grand aid plans“.