Who's cynical? You seem to be despite your undisputable complete cluelessness about pretty much everything aid industry related.Mr Lovejuice wrote:Ah! The old ten bullet point plan.Jacked Camry wrote:
As to your assertion that it's the old boys and girls who dream up these projects, you should be aware that the big decisions are made by the fly-ins, based on the latest bullshit served them by the government and some vague but trendy ideas that might be floating around the halls of Bretton Woods and Manila. Consultants have no power, they simply are served plates of shit and told to make a gourmet meal out of it.
It takes one who has worked in the industry, as you quite rightly put it, to be truly cynical about it.
It would be cynical to shrug your shoulders and just say "nothing I can do about it" and continue to suck up contracts to do things you don't believe in, take the money and run. I don't do that, but to get in that position has neither been easy nor without significant sacrifice. It is what is increasingly behind my many friends' decisions to quit early having become disillusioned. It would be cynical for them to just keep going until their pension is fully paid up and kids are through university but often now they're quitting before that point to try different things or just retire earlier.
What most people outside of the industry don't understand is that aid is about the hardest thing one can successfully do. You're essentially selecting the hardest group of people and conditions with which to achieve a positive outcome and given several handicaps (required partnership with government, poorly paid counterpart staff, lack of education and capacity at all levels, horrible bureaucracy to get anything done, locations where private sector is disinterested because there's no market, etc.) then told to go out and completely change things but from within, while attaining a series of ridiculous goals within an absurd timeframe and insufficient budget and infrastructure. It's not a wonder that it seldom succeeds, but this is ignored and the same process of massive TORs, small budgets and inappropriate design continues. Outsiders not surprisingly wonder why, but the bottom line is that the reason aid exists is that nobody else wants to go there and do something, and if they do, it's almost always highly exploitive to the locals and they end up losing their land and livelihoods as a result.
Aid, essentially, is a stopgap to keep things on the boil while we await the economic conditions in the country to improve such that development aid and NGOs become irrelevant other than to support the locals against continued exploitation. The major benefits are stability and income in the places they work, and the capacity they build that remains after they're gone. Most projects never achieve anything like they're supposed to, but we all know that and knew it when the project was designed. But if there were no development aid projects, there would be nothing.