Furthermore, one of the arresting officers was in fact black, Sgt. Crowley teaches racial profiling courses and the original caller did not even specify if the suspects were black.

So yeah, please focus on aid issues. I know this post was well intentioned but you didn’t have all the facts and when you do that you are in danger of just confirmiing your own biases.

On another note, the broader lesson your teaching here was applied to US military warfare techniques a few decades ago. Whereas the historical understanding was rigid rules, US officers on the ground can now make on-the-fly changes. This was first applied during the first US-Iraq war in Kuwait.

Generally there is a tendency for people to want publicly funded organizations (such as the police or international development agencies) to be rule based – in order to ensure that money is well spent in terms of efficiency/risk management and that it is distributed fairly (i.e. no subjective and possibly biased judgements). But as this post nicely illustrates – this doesn’t always yield optimal results.

In the international development aid context this can translate into agencies being overly micro-managed by donors, or by individual project officers being overburdened with bureaucratic requirements into how projects are implemented and reported. Rules also are more appropriate when the “right” way to do things is known – but in development contexts the right answers in a given context are not always known and so overgeneralizing things into rules can clearly lead to poor outcomes.

Most of the people I know working in international development are hardworking, smart and trustworthy. I’d argue what is needed are ways to better empower project staff to make their own decisions using their own judgement based on the circumstances they are facing, while ensuring reasonable systems are in place to ensure some degree of sensible risk management and accountability. Easier said than done of course!

Adam Baker asked whether people, aid workers in particular are “robot-like” or “quality” people. I’m not sure this distinction works for me – but would rather stress i) is a person a good match for the job they are in? and ii) does the environment where they work empower them to make the decisions they need to make? Often “quality” people are put in positions where they are not encouraged or even allowed to use their judgement, with predicatable results, as well as wasted abilities.

Here, from today’s USA Today, an IG report comes out in March 2008 showing fraud and waste in a $600 million program but isn’t noticed for more than a year.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2009-07-26-usaid-jobs_N.htm

Continue to publish the stupid outcomes and good aid success stories so that we can follow up on both within our expanding communities. DRI can’t do it alone.

Respectfully,

Claudia McGeary

Founder, Faith in Africa