Who Knows Best? Where USAID Stands on Social Soundness

The "New Directions" guidelines first implemented by AID ten years ago directed the Agency's assistance program to the least developed groups in society. This orientation was notable for focusing on the needs of, especially, the rural poor. Earlier assessments of development having revealed that measures of growth in terms of GNP and per capita income were illusory for what they disguised about what was happening to the poor, AID took the bold step of declaring its intention to aim assistance more explicitly at disadvantaged populations, the weakest segments of less developed societies. The program undertaken was meant to involve the poor more directly in design and implementation activities. Participation became a key concern as the feasibility of projects in the local socio-cultural milieu was assessed and beneficiary groups identified. By working more closely with so-called target groups, AID reasoned that those members of society most in need would be more certain of benefiting from the technical assistance offered. By evaluating project validity in terms of social soundness, AID intended to prevent a wealthy elite from profiting at the expense of the poor majority. Social soundness introduced a point of view which focused on the distribution of benefits among the population, especially the needy. Sociologists were asked to go to the poorest of the poor to find out their problems. While this shift in orientation demonstrated a coming to terms with the inequitable impacts ofearlier programs, it did not witness a change in the magnitude of local participation of the scale which social soundness was intended to promote. Although the Agency has borne witness during this period to a growth in consciousness of the significance of social factors in the development process, still the transfer of skills to host country nationals has not been sufficient to enable them to run programs themselves, an admittedly fundamental objective. AID'S present system of accountability, based largely on the achievement of technological goals, forces officers and advisors to undertake administrative and technological activities themselves, and has limited their willingness to involve local participants more in activities whose successful unfolding or not is the basis upon which the competency of the AID officer is judged. The major objective of the AID program for this reason can no longer be the development of beneficiary groups chosen from among the poor, but more broadly the transfer of skills and the development of human resources. To encourage its personnel to work more in the collaborative mode, AID needs to establish criteria for measuring host country participation and growth of capability. By holding its people accountable more for skills transfer than for strict adherence to technological models and fiscal and legal regulations, AID can help to create the environment in which human resource development takes place. Although the benefit incidence of programs should not be entirely disregarded, it is participation which more closely represents the social soundness of development. In our present conception of beneficiary groups we retain the implied notion that development is something we do for or to people; we want instead to have people participating in generating growth themselves. By abandoning the current commitment to the technological approach, as discussed below, in favor of one which more promotes management skills development, AID will demonstrate support for the social soundness of its projects and programs. This paper is an attempt to identify features of the AID system which weaken the Agency's assistance effort and is based on the author's experience within the Agency in Washington and at post. The discussion is focused on the social soundness component in the AID program, but strikes more broadly at the operation of the AID system of assistance as a totality. The perspective on AID presented here is a function of the author's direct involvement in all aspects of mission planning and programming and of contact and collaboration with colleagues whose experience in AID and development has been lengthy and profound. In no way do the perspectives of these individuals necessarily correspond to those of the author; yet their willingness to share experiences and views has been invaluable in coming to appreciate more the meaning of events. The level of awareness that colleagues in AID have demonstrated of the needs of people in developing countries, of their limitations and aspirations, repeatedly has been apparent and profoundly gratifying. The attempt in this paper to identify encumbrances in the AID system is in no way intended to subvert the efforts of these individuals. The objective, rather, is to take a critical stance because it is potentially constructive to do so, and recommend ways in which the AID program can be improved.