"Foreign aid’s results: better than the image?" 
Despite the critics, many programs are helping villagers help themselves.

It was strange, chatting in Bamako with Richard Holbrooke about Hal Rogers.

America’s ambassador to the United Nations, conceivably the secretary of State in an Al Gore administration, does not think Kentucky’s 5^th District congressman is a bad guy.

« I know him, and I like him, » holbrooke insists. « But when we ask him for money for foreign aid, he says, « I have people at home without toilets. »

Indeed, in a floor speech last month while Congress was slashing the Clinton administration’s foreign aid request, the gentle man from Somerset exploded. « All they want is to give the taxpayers’ money away to foreign countries and be damned what happens at home,» Rogers said.

Because he’s a member of the House Appropriations Committee, it matters what Hal Rogers thinks about the money Americans send to the rest of the world, in such vehicles as the U.S. Agency for International Development Program.

It matters what Sen. Micth McConnell thinks, too, since he is chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that deals with foreign aid.

It was McConnell who complained, during the fight over this year’s foreign operations appropriation. « I don’t know where the President wants to get more money for this bill. Are we going to take it out of the Social Security trust fund to spend it on foreign aid ? »

Holbrooke, for his part, thinks that America’s spending on foreign aid, as a percentage of gross national product, is embarrassingly meager.

The facts bear him out.

As Karen DeYoung noted recently in the The Washington Post, « While America has enjoyed one of its most prosperous decades ever in the 1990s, it also has set a record fr stinginess. For as long as people have kept track, never has the United States given a smaller share of its money to the world’s poorest. »

The U.S. gives developing countries (read, crushingly poor) less than any other industrialized nation.

And as the United Nations Resident Reprsentative in Mali, Tore Rose, pointed out to me during my recent trip, if you eliminate U.S. aid to Israel and Egypt from the calculation, the profile of U.S. financial help abroad looks even less impressive.

The impact of this American attitude is especially cruel in Africa, where private companies have not made up the difference as they have with investment in some parts of East Asia and Latin America.

Africa presents the biggest P.R. problem, because it’s there that aid efforts are alleged to have failed most miserably. The military and humanitarian assistance sent to Somalia is viewed, in retrospect, as having been wasted in an unmitigated debacle (even though folks on the ground say the situation there finally has begun to stabilize). Aid money in Rwanda found its way, in some instances, to those responsible for genocidal atrocity.

Across the continent, images of wasteful dictators, tribal conflict and natural disaster make Africa the exemplar of choice for anti-aid campaigns.

Because the humanitarian agencies, governmental and private, have not repealed the laws of bureaucracy, you can in fact, find waste. Of course there is failure from time to time.

But the reality of aid programs can be uplifting, too, as in the case of Rose’s program to install multi-purpose power platforms in 500 Malian villages, and to put local women in charge of them.

This does not require fancy new technology. The strategy, Rose believes, is elegant and effective.

It’s also breathtakingly simple : help an organization of village women finance the purchase of a « multifunctional platform » built around a sturdy one-cylinder motor that has a long record of versatile service. It produces mechanical power to relieve women of back-breaking, time-consuming hand labor such as grinding meal and pumping water. It also can produce electricity, which the women can sell to those who want power to run a saw , light a clinic, energize an arcwelding tool or charge a battery.

The seeds of the pourghere plant, which grows in the region, can be crushed by an attachement to the platform. The motor uses a liter of pourghere oil while crushing enough seeds to produce 21 additional liters of the lubricating oil.

Not only does the work life of a village change when the platform arrives. The social structure changes, too.

I asked Laurent Coche, the fiery young administrator of the multifunction platform program in Mali, whether this creates problems in a culture where women traditionally do most of the work, while men spend their time talking and deciding.

« No, not really, » Coche said.

But really, I persisted, this must create social problems.

« Well, we all have problems in our lives, don’t we ? » he replied, with a sly grin. « And we solve them. »

The men must object to the empowerment of the women, I insisted.

« You have to remember,», he said, « that we are empowering women in work that traditionally has been theirs. »

Two hundred and sixty-two kilometers from Bamako, in a village of 1.342 near the Guinean border, there's’testimony to support Coche’s assessment.

Kanimba Sidibe, who heads the Balanfina women’s association, agrees with him.

Through an interpreter, she tells a group of visitors. « Something as useful as the machine cannot be allowed to cause problems among us ».

« At the beginning, we didn’t want to send the girls to school, » she recalls. « Since the machine came (five years ago), a lot of girls have been freed from daily chores, so we send them to school. »

The women of Balanfina also have an incentive to become literate, and to learn arithmetic, in order to operate the machine and manage its use.

Once exhausted by their daily duties, they now have more time and energy for vegatable gardening. Which improves their families’ diet , and for child rearing. Not to mention simple socializing.

When life in a village like Balanfina improves. With the addition of  water systems and power supplies, there’s less reason for young people to drift into the cities, where life often is more difficult for the poor.

Nobody is giving the villagers a better life. They’re investing in themselves, and working to protect that investment.

Twilight is the most beautiful time of day in Balanfina. The sky behind the round adobe huts turns vaguely pink.

Only the health clinic is lit at night. Some day, if the village manages carefully, every family could have electricity.

Before that, they must find a way to finance a water tower.

« Gradually, the support system provided by the platform project will fade away, » Tore Rose predicts. « There is nothing in the project which cannot take on such a life of its own.

David Hawpe’s column appears Wednesdays and Sundays in the Forum

HOW YOU CAN HELP

Is your club, church or social organization interested in helping a Malian village finance a multipurpose platform, like the one that has brought labor-saving power to Balanfina ? The cost is about $5.000. Or, for an individual or group interested in helping a village take the next step, installation of a water system, the cost is about $10,000.

Those interested in discussing these programs to improve life for women and their families in West African villages may write to administrator Laurent Coche, United Nations Dvelopement Program, B.P. 120. Bamako, Mali. You may fax him at (223) 22-62-98 in Bamako. Or e-mail him at plateforme@cefib.com