It takes a village: Humanitarian projects better sustained with local leadership

SALT LAKE CITY — They were the kind of results researchers have nightmares about.

In the early 1980s, James B. Mayfield trekked from village to village in Indonesia, tracking down projects planned and paid for by the World Bank and USAID. He found broken wells, abandoned schools, hospitals that weren't functioning. Eighty-three percent of charity projects had failed.

Disturbed and discouraged, Mayfield turned to the closest villager, a slender man with deep, dark eyes, and demanded an answer, "Why?"

"Mr. Mayfield," replied the villager matter-of-factly. "We are waiting for the Americans to come back and fix their water pumps."

The comment sparked something in Mayfield, who was at that time a political science professor at the University of Utah. If villagers were more involved in the generation and implementation of ideas, he wondered, would they be more likely to maintain the schools, hospitals and wells their international partners were building for them? When he later founded CHOICE Humanitarian, a Utah-based nonprofit that builds schools, water systems and micro-enterprise programs in Africa, Latin America and Asia, he would insist: "The local people will lead the way."

International aid organizations have long relied on locals to carry out charity work in developing countries. Ninety-five percent of international non-governmental field staffers are nationals of the host country, according to a recent study by the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action. But when it comes to top positions in the field, staff typically come from outside the country. The cost of trying to apply global blueprints to solve local problems was highlighted in Haiti, when would-be-heroes flocked to the country only to find, upon arrival, they lacked the local knowhow to implement their plans. It is evident in Mozambique where many villages have two or three broken wells paid for by well-meaning charities that have fallen into disrepair. It's also apparent in Uganda, where do-gooders installed hundreds of wood-burning stoves into the homes of people who use charcoal to cook.

In an effort to better mold aid to meet the needs of individual countries, the past decade has seen a growing number of Western organizations, like CHOICE, putting the reins in the hands of the natives they hope to help. The trend is new enough it has yet to be thoroughly studied by academics, but some experts muse more local control may be the future of international aid work.