Be a Reliable Partner: Development Takes Time

A community in Bangadesh meets with USAID-funded project staff. Since the country’s independence in 1971, Bangladesh has received consistent levels of development assistance from the United States.

Following the end of El Salvador’s civil war in 1992, USAID began a program to help rural communities displaced by the fighting. The project focused on cashew nut production, providing families with trees to plant and technical assistance. After that, the farmers established a farmers’ cooperative with support from USAID. Next, USAID coordinated with European aid agencies to help farmers begin to process their cashews so they would be worth more at market. The European agencies and USAID then worked together to help the farmers break into sales to export markets. Farmers who have benefited from the program are now earning enough to send their children to school, cover their family’s health expenses, and pay for a portion of other household expenses.¹ But it took more than a decade to reach this point.

Development occurs gradually over time. Bursts of progress at the outset are encouraging but do not guarantee sustainable outcomes. The example of cashew cultivation in El Salvador illustrates how development is a process of building success on top of success. The first success: planting the trees to produce a source of food and a cash crop. Second, forming a cooperative to capitalize on economies of scale; third, adding value to the product using processing technology; fourth, diversifying and expanding their markets. More than a decade later, the resources invested in the earlier successes are paying off in income, health, and education gains. The farmers’ children have more opportunities than their parents did, which is what development assistance is meant to do.

Development on a national scale demands still more patience. China is the best example of dramatic reductions in poverty the world has ever seen. Between 1981 and 2004, the poverty rate fell from 65 percent of the population to 10 percent.² We associate China’s economic success with the “Made in China” label on manufactured goods. But the rise of the manufacturing sector came after astounding productivity growth in agriculture during the Green Revolution, which was fueled by donor investments in agriculture and national government prioritization of food security and rural development.³

When people are asked to name successful examples of development assistance, the ones that invariably come up are long-term investments such as the agricultural innovations that propelled rural growth in China and other Asian countries or the eradication of smallpox, which took more than a decade.⁴ Both efforts were launched in the 1960s. At that time, USAID country missions were able to develop five-year plans with some assurance that funding would be available and priorities would not be changed in Washington. Today there are few instances when the U.S. government is willing to make a commitment of up to five years. One is the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Unlike most other development programs, MCA initiatives have enough time to experiment and learn from the inevitable mistakes of their early phases. When projects last only a year or two, project officers have much less room to be creative or to adapt project plans as situations change.

The trend toward short-term commitments is out of step with what we know it takes to boost food security and reduce hunger in a lasting way. Agricultural research, for instance, generally takes more than a decade to be translated into the anticipated productivity gains.⁵ The time horizon on infrastructure projects is typically 10 to 30 years.⁶ On food security-related programming, commitments of five years or more should be the norm rather than the exception, and they should be reliable. It is much more difficult for developing country governments to plan their own budgets when there’s no way of knowing how long commitments will last or if and when donor priorities will change. For countries that depend on aid, such as many in sub-Saharan Africa, unpredictable aid flows carry serious consequences. According to one study, “The [volatility] of the aid system has generated the same negative shocks to per capita incomes in developing countries, and with more frequency, as the two World Wars and the Great Depression generated in developed countries.”⁷ Shocks on this order of magnitude are clearly catastrophic. The same study notes that of all donors, the United States has the most volatile pattern of assistance.

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness includes expectations that governments of developing countries will consult with citizens who stand to benefit from donor assistance.⁸ The objective is to articulate the broadest, most inclusive view of the country’s development priorities. These talks will no doubt raise expectations among citizens. When donors fail to come through at all or don’t sustain their commitments, disappointment and frustration are inevitable reactions.

When programs end after a year or two, it’s difficult to reach any reliable conclusions about their long-term impact. Short-term programs are shaped from the very beginning by the need to demonstrate short-term results, which affects everything from program design to implementation and evaluation. Evaluation generally means measuring inputs and outputs rather than actual development outcomes. It is possible to count how many additional children are in school or how many have been vaccinated. It is more difficult to evaluate how much the children are learning.

Residents carry water in Barrio Las Fuerzas in Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

Increasing agricultural productivity or economic growth, or empowering women, requires different expectations about timeframes altogether. These are big economic and social issues that don’t turn around in a year or two. It’s much easier to report how many people received shipments of food aid than to show that investments in agricultural research led to less poverty or sustainable improvements in food security. The disparity between how much emergency food aid the United States gives versus how little it invests in agricultural programming could be seen as symptomatic of the reluctance to make long-term commitments to development.

A system that is unwilling to pay for long-term development programming can lead to results that don’t make sense. For example, a small portion of U.S. food aid actually funds development projects. This started in the 1990s as the budget for agricultural programming was rapidly shrinking. USAID and its implementing partners (World Vision, Save the Children, CARE, ACDI-VOCA, and other NGOs) were desperately looking for a way to shift more money into development programs and to stretch it further than a year or two. They persuaded Washington to dedicate a portion of food aid for development.

In practice, this usually means that U.S. food aid commodities are shipped to a recipient country and then sold in local markets, with the money then used for a development project. Such “monetization” of food aid is clearly inefficient. Worse, often the effect of introducing U.S. commodities into local markets is to depress grain prices, which hurts farmers. Ironically, the farmers may well be the intended beneficiaries of the development program being funded with food aid. The monetization of food aid illustrates the lengths to which the implementers of development assistance have sometimes had to go to transcend policies that don’t work for people on the ground.

Issues