So after being in Benin for seven months and at post for five I have already become an expert in developing a third world country. Just kidding. I realize that I still have a lot to learn, but this whole Peace Corps thing…well, it could be done differently and have a much larger impact. As it exists right now, Peace Corps is more about cultural exchange than anything else. I believe Peace Corps should exist primarily to give the host population the ability to help themselves and cultural exchange will occur regardless. All of my conclusions below are based on that premise. These are my ideas.
1) Get rid of TEFL
TEFL stands for Teaching English as a Foreign Language. These volunteers put in around 15 hours of work a week in a local high school teaching English to the Beninese. To their credit, because these volunteers have the most structured schedule with regular classes, they actually lose the least amount of volunteers due to early termination (quitting). They also can do some impressive side projects outside of the high school because they are automatically connected with a large host structure, the high school. But I ask, what the heck does a Beninese person need to speak English for? I have met people on the street selling these ice cream-like treats out of carts who speak better English than I do French. People here have this belief that if you can speak English you can either get a good job or get out of Benin. I hate to be debbie-downer but neither is likely to happen. Maybe you could get a job as a teacher in Benin, but since the Government doesn’t have any money, they regularly stop paying them, which leads to teacher strikes. A volunteer spending countless hours preparing and giving lessons is a waste and does little to give the Beninese an ability to help themselves.
2) Get rid of EA
EA stands for Environmental Action…yes I think Peace Corps needs to do away with the specific enviro volunteer despite the fact that I am an enviro volunteer. Let me explain. Lets say you struggle to put food on your family’s table, you can’t pay for all of your children to go to school, and you do not have a regular job. Do you really give two shits about the environment? You might say, well, since they are poor their lives literally depend on the environment, and you would be absolutely correct. If the crops fail due to natural causes or poor farming practices, then people die. If the rains don’t come or come to hard (that’s what she said) then people die. Basically, if people depend on their environment and they don’t take care of it then they will have huge problems. I completely agree with that, but specific EA volunteers are overkill. We try to protect the environment or educate in an atmosphere, at least in Benin, where very few people have any choice on changing behaviors to care for their environment. Therefore any behavior change you are really hoping to make needs to be profitable for the person. As you will read in a sec, I am not advocating for a total abolition of the EA volunteer in Benin, just a serious change.
3) Everyone becomes a Health or Small Enterprise Development (SED) Volunteer with an EA volunteer’s education as well.
I believe that the really only effective means of development in Benin right now are small businesses. Benin needs to somehow create small business so that the people can develop some disposable income, create a middle class, and give the government something to tax in order to provide civil services. The biggest problem in Benin is an extreme lack of available credit. Should someone have an idea and they need someone or something to invest in that idea to cover the start up costs, they are pretty much out of luck. Microloan companies can do some amazing things, but they are only appropriate for certain circumstances. I truly believe that too much aid goes to pay for immediate needs or services and while these are important, they do little to advance Beninese society as a whole. I think the most effective avenue for change within the Peace Corps are Small Business Development Volunteers. They work to create small enterprises that put power into the hands of the poorest members of society by connecting them with funding sources, education, and markets. The local population comes with the ideas and the PCV helps to develop them and the business to provide a needed service or product. If this is done well, the business or co-operative will become self-sustaining and provide necessary income to its members years after the PCV. So, I would split the volunteers into half; one group is SED/EA and the other is Health/EA. Sorry TEFL. Since the majority of people in Benin survive with what they take out of the land, I would train all the SED/EA volunteers how to create businesses that try to protect and conserve their natural resources while at the same time profiting off of those natural resources. For example, one could create a tree nursery with a motivated individual by teaching them how to plant trees (EA) and then how to market/sell them (SED). Then this tree nursery could work with local schools, donate trees, and at the same time as working with the students to reforest the area they are providing necessary environmental education (SED/EA).
Health, I believe is equally important because it does address the immediate needs of a society, while SED/EA focuses more on long term needs. Because people live so closely to the land, their health and their environment are directly connected. You can teach someone that they need to drink clean water to prevent diarrhea and potentially deadly dehydration (Health) but if you don’t show them how to filter their water using locally available supplies (EA) then you do little to address the problem. You can tell someone they need to diversify their diet to ensure greater food security and health (Health) but if you don’t teach them how to build a garden, plant vagetables, and prepare them (EA), again you are doing little to address the problem. I would then encourage all Health volunteers to focus on projects that might be able to earn revenue for a motivated individual or group.
In conclusion, every volunteer would either receive the education of a SED or Health volunteer with a few weeks during training dedicated to the environment.
Obviously people have spent years studying development, not to mention writing thousands of pages on the subject. Here, I can do little more but provide my ideas based on my experiences. Peace Corps is a great organization, but I think it could be improved to become more of an agent for change of a society than of the participating volunteer. What other org has a development agent live with the host population for two years? PC really needs to take advantage of the community integration that comes with that kind of time and focus more on small enterprise development and health by marrying it to environmental protection/education. Again, sorry TEFL volunteers.
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I like your post about marrying up EA work with other goals. I was a PCV forester in the Oueme, Pobe, in the mid-1990s, and my job, as I saw it (and as it seemed to work best), at least when I was working with farmers, was to show them how they could make money (or equivalent) doing what I knew as a forester to be good for the environment. All the locals wanted to reestablish forest, but figured they could not afford to do so, so I told them that I understood they needed to be able to feed their kids, send them to school, get medicine, etc., and that it was my job to show them how they might do that by bringing in at least some elements of forest.
ReplyDeleteI was there mid-career and people asked me why I was there, did I not have a life at home?--I told them that deforestation in West Africa caused more dust to be blown into the tropical Atlantic, seeding more hurricanes (true) that affected the US, so that their problems were our problems, so I was there to work on "their" problems, all that I could. National economic stability, no need to emigrate, retaining species diversity, etc. They thought that was OK, and seemed happy to work together on our problems.
I started a micro-credit/savings system that became regional, that worked well for 10 years at least (personnel changes, and consequent lack of understanding probably did it in, though this could have been prevented had we hooked them up to reliable oversight (as in overseer), which did not exist when we set it up, and the bank members were unable to locate such when their need came. I don't know for sure that it went under, but I lost touch with those people after 10 years or so.
Anyway, I think that frequently just the presence of respectful, constructive outsiders in their community can give the locals hope, the sense that they are not completely isolated in their problems, that they are of importance beyond their daily circles, are part of a larger community. Which can produce at least some increase in their happiness, which should be one of the major goals of Development. Now, just how to make it more permanent?