You might remember the Youtube video of this guy named Matt who did this silly dance and captured it on video everywhere he went a few years ago?
Well.. he's back, with friends.
It's a good video to watch when you worry about things like war, unfair trade practices, poor foreign policy, dictatorship, and so on -- it reminds you that people are globally friendly, silly, happy folk if given a chance. Which is always true, but not always easy to remember.
You may remember Strauss from his NYT article damning the Peace Corps back in January. It made the point that the increasing numbers of volunteers is decreasing the agency's effectiveness and that the agency itself was too stuck on its mission to improve and adapt. Strauss has been a volunteer, and also a country director, with the Peace Corps, and I as a returned volunteer can agree with some of his points.
He's back now in April with a much longer attack in Foreign Policy.com, where he sets up a series of strawmen to knock down.
For example;
“The Peace Corps Is a Potent Diplomatic Weapon”No. With diplomats stuck inside barricaded compounds or loath to venture from expatriate residential ghettos, a Peace Corps volunteer is likely to be the only representative of the U.S. government that poor, rural populations ever see. As the State Department cuts back on its public diplomacy and cultural exchange programs, the Peace Corps’ predominantly young volunteers wind up carrying more and more of the responsibility for demonstrating that the United States still has good intentions abroad.
He goes on to make the point that the branding of Peace Corps is insufficient and doesn't connect the volunteers on the ground with the foreign policy of the USA -- probably because there's not much connection, and potentially some antagonism. I think this argument falls flat; PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) show the multifaceted America, not just the 51% who won the last presidential election. The fact that they are on the ground and working in solidarity with the local population is probably more valuable than State Department-funded programs will ever be. Of course, Strauss hasn't offered any research or quantitative data, so I don't feel a need to either.
Best and brightest? As long as applicants meet the minimum standards and are healthy and persistent, the Peace Corps rarely rejects them outright.
If you click through to Getty, you find this description for the photo:
KIANGAN, PHILIPPINES: Wearing an Ifugao tribes outfit, Dustin Butler, (L) an American Peace Corps volunteer based in northern Ifugao province takes part in the celebration of the ten traditional rice rituals in Kiangan, 27 August 2006. American volunteers have been deployed in limited numbers in the country following security threats in certain areas especially in southern Philippines where al-Qaeda linked Islamic militants have kidnapped foreigners. AFP PHOTO / GARBIEL MALAYA (Photo credit should read GABRIEL MALAYA/AFP/Getty Images)
Do PCVs party? No doubt about it. I threw and/or attended quite a few gatherings as a volunteer. It's a tough job, and you need to unwind, decompress, complain about the various systems and institutions, brainstorm on the underlying problems, and just relax. If you're going to ding PCVs for saving up all their "happy hours" for an occasional big party, fine, but don't expect me to want to grab a beer with you after work. Also, no need to abuse a photo of a volunteer integrating himself with his village to make your point.
He complains that Peace Corps doesn't concentrate on the world's poorest countries, and that volunteer numbers rarely match the need (using Mexico as an example). Peace Corps operates only in countries where there's reasonable safety for US citizens to be out and about in country, instead of "stuck inside barricaded compounds or loath to venture from expatriate residential ghettos" as he knocks US diplomats and USAID professionals for. Further, PC only operates on the invitation of a country's government. We actually pressured Mexico into accepting volunteers, and in return they required very specific, business/IT focused volunteers for a very small pilot project.
“The Peace Corps Is a Development Organization” which receives little recognition from development thought leaders. Well, actually, Peace Corps is 1/3rd development and 2/3 cultural exchange (remember the first point you were making?). It's true that Peace Corps has not been effective at evaluating its impact. Neither have big development agencies such as USAID or World Bank. In fact, even the academic crowd has had a difficult time finding statistical evidence of any benefit to foreign aid. If Strauss has actually read William Easterly's book which he notes, he'll find pages and pages of commentary and research on aid effectiveness and measurement problems both "real" and political.
“The Peace Corps Has a Strategy” The Peace Corps has plans, not a strategy. A strategy implies a conclusion, a final goal. The Peace Corps has none. In Washington, plans are already underway to celebrate the agency’s 50th anniversary in 2011. Celebrating half a century of existence ought to be a dubious benchmark for any development organization, particularly one that actively encourages its volunteers to “work themselves out of a job,” yet has no plans for doing so itself in any of the more than 70 countries where it is currently active.
Again, Peace Corps is on the benign side of most development organizations, particularly the Bank, on this one. I might also point out that there are many countries where volunteers no longer serve -- because the country has "graduated" you might say from having a need for PCVs.
“The Peace Corps Is One of the Greatest Things America Has Ever Done”Dream on. Today, the Peace Corps remains a Peter Pan organization, afraid to grow up, yet also afraid to question the thinking of its founding fathers. The rush to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s 1960 campaign pledge was such that the Peace Corps never learned to crawl, let alone walk, before it set off at a sprinter’s pace. The result is a schizophrenic entity, unsure if it is a development organization, a cheerleader for international goodwill, or a government-sponsored cross-cultural exchange program. In any case, the Peace Corps tries to do too many things in too many places with too few people to really get much of anything done at all. ... Based predominantly on the life-changing experiences volunteers had while serving, the Peace Corps continues to generate strong support from the American people. But for the agency to approach its potential, deep, substantive changes must be made.
So, almost 200,000 US citizens have had life-changing experiences thanks to Peace Corps? It's balancing between being " a development organization, a cheerleader for international goodwill, or a government-sponsored cross-cultural exchange program" -- which sounds like the three goals of the Peace Corps Mission to me, so if it's flittering between those, it's on track.
Does the organization have some problems? No doubt. Are these valid attacks? No. We should work on removing the political appointees from the organization, matching funding increases to politically-motivated requirements to increase volunteer numbers, and hold all organizations working in international development to higher standards of unbiased measurement and evaluation and sustainability goals.
I actually believe that Peace Corps is a potent diplomatic weapon -- a loose cannon of idealistic youth who probably don't agree with the status quo of American foreign policy.
And that's a good thing.
Big thanks to GWU's Organization for International Development for importing their events calendar into google calendars. I was getting pretty close to doing that by myself.
Now, if SID/W and World Affairs Council would do the same, I'd be scheduled for life!
I like the good people day idea all about giving props where due. Since I'll be nose-down in work preparing for the upcoming Global Youth Service Day April 25-28, let me point out the amazing youth around the world who do the real work on GYSD as some people who rock. Last year we had over three million youth in over 100 countries taking up projects to improve their community -- and expect the same or more this year.
BTW; Gary? "...tomorrow people write and talk abd blog and twitter and just flat out SING about people that are AWESOME and GOOD."
Who. Not that. Things are that, people are who. Yes, I do have a problem with grammar (except in lolcats)
Disclosure: I work at Youth Service America, where Tara Suri is a member of the National Youth Council, a collection of amazing young people who make the likes of most of us tired with just seeing the amount of good they get done on a daily basis. She's a co-founder of HOPE (Helping Orphans Pursue Education) (when she was 13), She was also named Cosmo Girl of the year for 2007, and has recently launched TurnYouWorldAround.org and Aandolan.org, is an accomplished photographer, public speaker, and traveler.
TurnYouWorldAround.org/Aandolan (which means a movement for change in Hindi) is an organization that "implements social-change initiatives and provides youth with the tools to become changemakers." I don't want to spoil the surprise waiting for you if you explore the site for a few minutes.
TurnYouWorldAround/Aandolan's recent project is Connect a Kid, where youth can create projects to fund-raise for OLPC through their school, community, or just friends and family:
[Connect a Kid] is an initiative of Aandolan, an organization started by teens that provides youth with the tools to become change-makers. Having partnered with OLPC, [Connect a Kid] works to raise funds to purchase laptops, and also aims to raise awareness about the need for global education. Youth register --- and then work with friends and family to help kids around the world!
The website and information packet you get post-registration provide fundraising event ideas, action plan outlines, and other useful tools to create, promote, and evaluate project(s). The groundbreaking part of this is that it's a youth-to-youth program, empowering both the recipient of the XO laptop as well as the giver to realize their ability to organize and enact change.
My friend over at Esperanza en Accion in Nicaragua, has let people know that someone is attempting aland grab against a cooperative clothing factory, Nueva Vida, that'sone of her suppliers. Nueva Vida's supporters are asking that we email Nicaragua's first lady, Rosario Murillo, who has been "a strong defender of poor women throughout the country" asking for her support. They also ask that we forward the story widely so that others can do the same.
It's important to do this because evidence Nueva Vida provides good jobs for dozens of women in a country where unemployment runs higher than 70% and even college-educated people are happy to take jobs in sweatshops, and because cooperative factories like Nueva Vida show that fair trade has possibilities beyond just trinkets and coffee. And your email can help--displays of international solidarity have helped helped prevent worse disasters. Take a couple of minutes to use your privilege as a member of the imperial power to do a good thing. Nueva Vida is unique in being the only fair-trade garment factory to get to share in the tax and ex/im benefits of the free trade zone.
The full story and ready-to-go emails to the first lady Murillo under the cut.
Update: Stop the emails! The campaign was amazingly successful; so much so that they can't continue the conversation because their emails are lost in the continuing flood our our emails. Follow the progress of the land issue at this blog
A good friend of mine has condensed a lot of good, critical thoughts on lending -- from the subprime market to the World Bank, into one good blog post, riffing off of an exploration of the subprime disaster at salon.com. After my friend reminds us that the central function of the World Bank is as a bank - lending money and recouping interest from those loans (which are development projects so wonderful that the governments involved will be able to pay the loans back from the benefits of the project), he goes on to make some specific points (warning:some curse words to make a point follow):
First, whenever you hear someone say that the Bank or other such institutions should switch to providing for basic human needs--building schools, vaccinating, empowering women--there's nothing wrong with those goals per se, but do you want to take out a loan to advocate for them? When do you think you're going to see the payoff that let's you pay off the loan?Second, Remember that the Bank and IMF also have encouraged governments to cut taxes, among other neoliberal policies. Given that the governments are supposed to be taxing to inter alia pay off the loans they took from those institutions in the past, this advice should strike you a bit like a credit-card company telling you to take a pay cut, and just to give them smaller payments over a longer period of time. Who does that help?
So there was a debt crisis, right? Poor countries had shitloads of debt that they couldn't pay back--that they would probably never be able to pay back, because the entire premise of the loans had often been faulty. [...] I have no doubt--zero--that governments mis-used some of the money they received. [...] the more damning this next question becomes: why did creditors keep lending them all that fucking money?
I mean, remember: some asshole at the World Bank lent the government of Zaire, under Desiree fucking Mobutu, billions of dollars. Shouldn't that asshole be fired? Shouldn't his bank, which made such stupid decisions, be closed down? After all, no matter how irresponsible a borrower is, he can only become a risk of default if somebody lends to him. It takes TWO parties to make a loan, good, bad or otherwise.
In short, with both the subprime lending crisis and World Bank loans, we have the same problem; there are structural reasons protecting lenders from their bad decisions. With the Bank, they have such a stranglehold on all international funds for a country that no one can dare to default on a loan. With the subprime market, there's the last resort of a government bailout and reform that comes too late. For the lendees, they're just strapped with increasing debt, external forces guiding on their finances (bankruptcy limitations or structural adjustments), and no one sticking up for their side. My friend frames it thusly:
Lending crises usually involve large numbers of debtors risking default. But our unequal society never recognizes massive debtor default and the negative effects on debtors, in and of itself, as a crisis. Such default only becomes a "crisis" when the default is so large that it threatens to take down creditors--the rich people with the money.
HIPC (debt forgiveness for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) was a good step, but it got bogged down in further required structural adjustments and a Charlie Brown - and - Lucy game of football with increasing requirements and decreasing relief. In short, it remains a huge mess, with only one of the parties guilty of participating in a bad loan - the least able to defend itself or recover - paying the price.
Esperanza en Accion, a fair-trade, social justice organization working with Nicaraguan artisans, has a huge selection of items in their online eBay store, just in time for that last hard-to-find gift!
Buying Fair-trade of course is one of the best ways you can support global development and solidarity movements.
Carrot: "The World Bank has promised to contribute a record $3.5bn (£1.7bn) to help the world's poorest countries. The figure is double what the agency initially said it would give ..."
Carrot: "[Zoellick , World Bank President] also reduced the charges on loans to emerging countries, such as China, for the first time in nine years."
String: Head-scratching: "The dramatic step is part of the World Bank's strategy to increase its business with 79 nations classified as middle income, including India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa and get them to help with poverty-fighting efforts."
Stick: "Mr Zoellick warned that if the Group of Eight industrialised nations stuck to their promise made in 2005 to cancel the debts of the world's poorest countries, a shortfall was likely to emerge in the World Bank's aid pot."
...and the hand holding the stick: "He urged developed countries to increase their donations so as to help impoverished economies invest in their infrastructure and become sustainable, and not leave them to rely on money from countries that do not have their best interests at heart. "
Read: Pay the Bank or the commiesterrorists win!
Remember, Zoellick is new to his WB job, having served as the US Trade Rep for the thus-far failed Doha round, and then as Deputy Secretary of State to dubya. To quote from an Oxfam article regarding his stint as USTR:
Another area of trade policy in which the Bush administration exercises global leadership, superbly captured by the Zoellick manifesto, can be summarised in a single word, `hypocrisy'. Like the British colonialists that attracted the ire of the Boston tea party fraternity, the United States is a good old-fashioned mercantilist power, combining protectionism at home with a commitment to free trade overseas.
The WaPo has an excellent story of the New Latin Left movement, which has reduced their dependence on IMF and Bank loans (and their requisite policy prescriptions and structural adjustments), with an overall reduction from $49 billion in loans from 2003 to $759 million in 2006.
The new course, with its emphasis on health clinics and classrooms for poor communities, draws cheers in many parts of this country of 9 million, where about two-thirds of the population is poor. But economists and political opponents say they doubt it will lift large numbers from poverty...Since taking office last year, Morales, a former coca grower and the first indigenous tribesman to lead Bolivia, has nationalized Bolivia's oil and gas industry, reversing a privatization orchestrated by the IMF. He forced foreign energy firms to accept drastically diminished profits, increasing the government's royalties by more than $1 billion a year and earmarking the money for schools and hospitals. To gain a free hand, he has ended a credit agreement with the IMF and pulled out of a World Bank body that referees disputes with foreign firms.
"What drives things now is social conscience," said Florencio Choque, a government engineer. "This is rule by the poor."
The excellent mag Dollars & Sense has more on the shift away from the Bank by countries able to get funding from other sources (often Venezuela or China), leaving unfortunately the poorest and least capable nations still under the tutelage of the Bank, or as Mark Weisbrot puts it, the Bank is most active where it can do the most damage:
The IMF/World Bank cartel is still operating in the poorest countries, and it is through this cartel that the World Bank does its worst damage: the privatization of water in countries like Ghana and Tanzania, the imposition of user fees on primary healthcare and education in Kenya and other African countries, the privatization of social security systems in Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe, the destabilization and overthrow of Haiti's democratically elected government in 2004 and, most recently, the cartel's role in deciding that poor countries in sub-Saharan Africa could not spend 70 percent of the desperately needed aid money that they received from 1999 to 2005--to name just a few of many disastrous examples.
There are critics that point to the successes of the Bank and IMF policies at curbing runaway inflation, but these come at the cost of rising inequality, higher risk exposure to shifting capital markets, and less control over natural resources and public utilities. Perhaps walking away from the Washington Consensus (or at least having some competition in lenders) will provide these countries the ability to carve their own path of development. In the end, it is the only successful path anyhow.
The Vatican urges Catholics not to donate to Amnesty International (BBC):
The Vatican also said it was suspending all financial aid to Amnesty over what it said was the group's recent change of policy on the issue.Amnesty said it was not promoting abortion as a universal right.
But the group said that women had a right to choose, particularly in cases of rape or incest.
"No more financing of Amnesty International after the organisation's pro-abortion about-turn," said a statement from the Roman Catholic Church's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.
Well, at least we know that all those cheap "Hitler Youth" shots about the new Pope (not to mention comparing him to the Emperor in Star Wars) aren't totally unfounded, right?
I got to attend a lecture by William Easterly on his new book, focusing on whether or not foreign aid can affect world poverty (spoiler: the past 5 decades don't give a very encouraging answer, but there are some possibilities). I can't recommend his books highly enough for people to get a good, independent, but very well argued critical perspective on the "Washington Consensus" model of development. I'm not going to repeat the majority of his points on accountability and feedback and such, as they're well-argued in his books. One quick point, however, that really boils a lot of current development practice down to a coherent, easy-to-present, forehead-slappingly obvious critique that works really well against specifically the groups of people sabre-rattling for the Bank model.
The "Washington Consensus," even in the radical new forms of foreign aid such as the Millennium Development Goals, are economic plans put together by the top experts in the field esconced in Washington, DC, to be implemented in various countries worldwide. What does this remind us of? Central Planning, which has worked so well as an economic development and manangement policy historically.
Development, like politics, is a metaphorical room where you're amazed at just how many elephants can fit simultaneously, and yet be ignored. These elehpants are conjured through some central, unanswered questions. A former Bank employee friend of mine has a fine one, for example - ask any Bank defender how the incentive structure for determining loan recipient validity and reliability works when the loan agent is encouraged to issue loans, and the recipient doesn't have the option to default without serious global consequences.
Another question is the morality of development. Think of psychology or anthropology, and the extensive, exacting processes these professions have to approve studies involving humans, ensuring the safety of the subjects, measuring risk and making sure the subjects have been clearly educated on, accepted, and signed off on any risks involved. Now compare this to development, where entire nations are subject to the economic theory de jure, with, if they're lucky, pilot projects (which, if they're really lucky, are quantitatively measured and evaluated before being used as blueprints for a larger strategy). This new book review at the Boston Globe discusses this with an example of the response to the 2005 Pakistani earthquake, and problems in distributing aid to remote regions (or, indeed, effectively at all). An organization tried to implement a simple logging feature to get reports from aid agencies on where they were sending supplies to make sure that easily-accessible communities weren't over-compensated at the detriment to more remote areas. The response from the agencies was predictable - "people are dieing and you want us to fill out forms??"
This is a bit extreme on one hand, this was an unusual event, a disaster relief project, not your normal more organized development project, but at a certain level, the lesson still applies - yes, people are dieing, and guess what? they're also dieing because of your failure to organize. There are limits of bureaucratic inefficienies, but there are also inefficiencies in entirely horizontal structures with no coordinating effects.
This reminds me strongly of where software development goes awry in too many cases - the business addiction to urgency too often overrides the software development need for careful planning and forward-thinking organization.
In both software and international development, planning, testing, and strong, honest evaluation methods create better results. Similarly, the incentive structures are very hard to implement, as they take time and money while (profits, people) are being lost, so even though they "pay off" in the long run, it takes talented and willful management/policy makers to ensure that these structures are in place.
Making sure the code compiles and is bug-free is something that both the Microsofts and the World Banks of the world should keep an eye on.
The WorldMapper remaps the globe according to various statistics gathered mostly by the Bank and the IMF. Particularly interesting are the maps for license fee exports and imports. You can very visually see some winners and losers.
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