Good Intentions are Not Enough

Half of all Afghan children suffer from chronic malnutrition. A quarter die before the age of five.

U.S. foreign assistance is a vital tool for rebuilding shattered societies like Afghanistan. Anna Badken, who writes for Foreign Policy, reported online from several areas of war-torn Afghanistan in the spring of 2010. Her report¹ “Where Have All the Children Gone?” illustrates vividly how good intentions can go awry when it comes to foreign assistance.

Everyone in Shahraqi Mawjirin, home to 145 families, knows where their children are going—to the cemetery on the edge of the village. The children are dying of preventable malnutrition-related causes. In Afghanistan, one child in four dies before his or her fifth birthday; the country is second only to Sierra Leone in child mortality.²

U.S. foreign assistance built a school, a clinic, and a playground in Shahraqi Mawjirin. The school has no teacher, the clinic has neither a doctor nor medicine, and the playground sits unused. Given the immediate needs of the villagers, the sight of these projects is a constant reminder of what aid didn’t accomplish here. “Because there is no work, there is also no food. People bring discarded dry bread from the [nearby] village, soak it in boiling water, and eat the glop. Boiling the water is tricky, too. There is no firewood, and the women make brittle cooking fires with the dried grass their children gather in the desert.”

When Badken was interviewed on National Public Radio a few weeks after her story appeared, she reported that events in the village had taken a turn for the worse.³ The villagers had concluded that a resurgence of the Taliban in the area could only be explained as a plot by the United States to eliminate the village. It may be easy for people who are struggling for life’s basic necessities to believe such “explanations,” especially if they already see the ever-present empty school, barren clinic, and unused playground as signs of a lack of empathy with their plight.

Now juxtapose this with another scene from Afghanistan. Herat Province is on the western side of the country, bordering Iran. Hunger and malnutrition are just as common here as in other rural areas. Most of the 1.5 million residents of the province depend on subsistence agriculture. Poppies are raised for opium as well, because they generate income that feeds hungry children. Adults don’t like the dangers associated with the opium trade and would grow something else if they could earn a living from it. Thirty years ago, Afghanistan was one the world’s largest exporters of pomegranates, dates and raisins. But decades of conflict have plunged the agricultural sector into chaos.

Revitalizing Afghanistan’s rural economy is critical to the country’s long-term economic growth and a fundamental component of U.S. development strategy there.

In 2006–2007, a USAID project promoted the use of greenhouses, providing building materials and training to hundreds of farmers in three districts. Each of the 81 new greenhouses is now being shared by a group of farmers. This project was designed to increase the local supply of fruits and vegetables and rebuild agriculture markets with the hope of replacing poppy production. USAID reported that farmers participating in the program nearly doubled their annual incomes.⁴

When foreign assistance is done well, it can help people escape poverty and end chronic hunger. When it’s done poorly, it is a waste of resources and erodes public confidence—in both the donor and recipient countries—in the whole enterprise of development. It’s not an accident that some programs are strong and effective and others wasteful and ineffective. Structural problems with how the U.S. government gives and implements foreign aid has made the Shahraqi Mawjirin example more common than it should be.

Development assistance focused on agriculture is almost always a good bet. Building schools and hospitals, even playgrounds, are not poor investments in and of themselves, and no doubt the intentions were good. But good intentions don’t count in the end, and the further removed decision-makers are from beneficiaries and understanding their needs, the greater potential for projects to go wrong.