Sustainability and Other Buzzwords

I’m looking at this project, the one helping farmers make money by selling tomatoes, or goats, or whatever, and asking the question – what can make a project like that be successful and sustainable in five years, ten years? Part of the answer is this other buzzword, capacity building – not just throwing money at farmers but actually teaching them to fend for themselves after the NGO leaves. As I’ve mentioned, the project I’m looking at focuses on building local institutions and training farmers to manage them on their own. Will it work?

One of the things I noticed that farmers had learned is how to identify their needs and whom to ask for support. Farmers’ groups register with the District Agricultural Development Office, a government body whose role is to assist farmers with technical and even material support. At first, I thought, “Great, just pass these farmers on to someone else, keep them dependent on external aid.” But maybe it is a step in the right direction. Sustainability doesn’t mean they have to do it alone – look at the university ag extension system in the US. If farmers can figure out what kind of help they need (harder than it sounds when the development model is too often handouts with little input from the beneficiaries) and know where to go to get it, maybe that is a good model.

Except that the district ag office is incredibly underfunded and understaffed. So do we just move international donor money to the ag offices? That isn’t any more of a long-term solution than keeping NGOs in these villages forever. Nepal has a long way to go before it’s free of its dependency on foreign aid, but someone needs to be thinking about what a Nepal without foreign aid might look like. How could Nepal fund its own ag offices? Taxes? Have farmers’ groups pay for the services they get? Neither option seems feasible now – the government has almost no tax-collecting capacity, and these farmers who are barely scraping by couldn’t possibly pay enough to keep the offices running. But now it’s like the country is living paycheck to paycheck, just focusing on where the next source of international aid is coming from.

They need the aid. They need more of it. But eventually, someday, the goal has to be a country that can sustain itself without all the foreign aid and INGOs. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I think it’s worth trying to figure out – if we have no idea of where we want to go, we’re never going to get there.