I run a company that have done over 200 similar studies for various NGOs and international organisations.
In the general case, with some exceptions, we have found that two types of interventions stand above all others in terms of long term positive economic impact:
1. Infrastructure projects - like building roads
2. Gender projects - projects furthering women's rights in some way
These projects are long-term sticky and do not rely on continuous funding. A paved road will remain paved even after the funding is gone, and will have a positive impact on the community for many decades. Roads allow children to go to school in neighbouring villages, and people to sell their goods in a market, use a bike or other vehicle where they otherwise would not be able to.
Working with local governments to improving the attitudes towards girls and women often has a major impact on the economic output of a community both because more people can contribute, but also because the types of products and services become more diverse. This type of project is also sticky, once attitudes or structural barriers disappear they don't tend to come back.
Education or sanitation initiatives can be hit or miss, where, once funding dries up, all that is left is a non functioning latrine or empty school building.
I did an analysis of reconstruction spending in Afghanistan sometime around 2010, just looking at what money was spent where and what the impacts were. Infrastructure spending was the only thing that had any measurable return. Building roads in a given region reduced violence.
i have friends who did NGO aid work in Africa and they said their work developing potable water sources was often undone. build a village a clean watersource, a small dam or a well, and the rival next village over would get jealous, and some night they'd come over and destroy it. this was a couple decades ago.
that is so evil.
Dumb question but are there NGOs that also hand them AK-47 and show them how to defend themselves? You can't give people infrastructure in a place with no effective government and expect them to defend it with pleasant words. If you have nice things you have to also have a plan to defend nice things by the sword, if you do not you're actually inviting terrible things to happen. A lot of these NGO seem to focus on holistic approach, education, female empowerment but that's worth exactly 0 (actually, less than zero) if your community cannot defend itself and the next bumfuck warlord can just stroll into your now rather interesting town and rape everyone, off the men, and take all the shit.
Also I don't understand why, but your comment defaults to collapsed. That is a shame as it's highly relevant.
That combined with the fact that there is no culture of maintaining things at a community level. People from first world countries come in and build bridges/wells/etc and then they break down due to misuse or just age and there is no effort to maintain them, due to the ingrained culture that's taught from birth.
The USA has spent billions of dollars in the last century on trying to help African countries, but all it's realistically really led to is just more people in need in Africa. What happens to all those people that have become dependant on the aid when the US economy crumbles and there is no more money to send overseas?
The HDI of African countries generally has gone up since the 90's (although not all countries):
https://statbase.org/datasets/indexes-and-ratings/human-deve...
Western people suggesting Africa is an un-helpable backwater has been common for decades. Bill Gates likes to talk about all the progress made, in fact.
I don't know if you've seen the USA in the past few decades but there's no culture of maintaining things at a community level here either. We've got infrastructure crumbling all over the place.
“My pothole takes a month to get fixed” != “My community has no power or drinking water”
In the US it's not potholes at issue, it's major bridges on crucial transport corridors being well past their use by dates and not being funded to replace / upgrade / maintain etc.
Please don't trivialise: https://infrastructurereportcard.org/ https://www.asce.org/publications-and-news/civil-engineering...
You're correct that this inability to upkeep infrastructure is in stark contrast to those many places about the globe that have never had electricity or water delivered to home dwellings.
Such places typically get by generation to generation and look after what they do have .. and are often removed as communities from what outsiders seeking local community resources see as necessary to support the take over of local community and imposition of third party extraction.
You're correct that China hires US PMC's to secure the take over of generational land rights and build roads to export "water" in the form of agricultural products, etc. You're correct that local communities see unsecured roads as a resource of good gravel, etc to be used.
> Working with local governments to improving the attitudes towards girls and women
I'm genuinely curious about this. May I ask you how improving attitude is achieved?
Not OP, but I would personally say that it starts with improving behaviour through laws.
Once people stop becoming role models for poor behaviour then attitudes improve as the population sees them as equals.
See racial equality for similar examples. This is why the Conservative movements want to make sure they crack down on trans-rights early. If they let rules come in, then acceptance becomes mainstream.
Does #2 eventually tank birth rates though?
That's the point. You will work to consume till you die or at least until they don't need you anymore
It seems to be the combination of both #1, #2 plus every tech bro billionaires attempts to "make the world a better place". An urban population full of disconnected people too mentally and financially worn out to procreate paradoxically appears to be our definition of success. What are we succeeding at? That, I haven't worked out.
Bad idea. Unneeded infrastructure isn't cheap to maintain. It would have to be a bike trail and it's still of limited usefulness when the internet exists and there is no infrastructure to maintain vehicles.
What Africa needs is sustained investment. That will drive people to leave villages, but Western investors (and governments) are as short sighted as they can possibly be.
To invest, you literally have to come in with a security team / truckload of weapons or someone is paid (Wagner / Chinese government) to do it. The invested operation has to be vertically integrated with hand-picked assets, human resources, and supply chain. Very difficult situation to do in a way where the general populace benefits. In cases like Zimbabwe where farmers came in and did sustained investment, it did work having the tribal populace as helping hands but as soon as the reigns were handed over they immediately gutted everything and it went to shit followed by hyperinflation and mass starvation.
Very difficult problem that no one has really figured out. Kenya and Rwanda some of the more interesting leading edges in sub-saharan mainland africa as far as economics are looking.
I don't really get how "gender projects" are more "sticky" than education. Isn't it, after all, a specific type of education?
“Gender projects” change cultural norms, and don’t have ongoing variable costs. They just need to be funded long enough for the effects to be percolated throughout the community and become sticky.
Education projects require ongoing variable costs such as teachers, books, resources, etc. Even if the results are effective in the short term, once funding dries up for the variable costs the community can’t sustain the ongoing investment and as the parent says, all you have left are the fixed cost artifacts like schoolhouses but no funding to sustain the variable costs necessary to utilize it as a schoolhouse.
Investing in women is much more effective because they are usually more attached to their community and can’t up and leave nearly as easily (both because they are the primary ones taking care of their own families)
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